The Taming of the Queen Quotes

“Have learned that the most precious thing is a place where you can be as you are, where someone can see you as your true self.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer,” she says. “For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“Getting a woman into power is not the point—it’s getting a good woman into power who thinks and cares about what she does.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts make sense only when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“I believe that to be a free woman is to be both passionate and intelligent; and I am a free woman at last.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“To assure someone that if enough nuns sing enough Masses then her dead child will go to heaven is trickery as low as passing a false coin as good. To buy a pardon from the pope, to force the pope to annul a marriage, to make him set aside kinship laws, to watch as he fleeces his cardinals, who charge the bishops, who rent to the priests, who seek their tithes from the poor – all these abuses would have to fall away if we agreed that a soul can come to God without any intervention. The crucifixion is the work of God. The church is the work of man.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“Nowhere in the Bible does it say that marriage is a sacrament,” Anne replies. “It was not God who joined us together. The priest says it was; but this is not true. This is the word of the church, not the Bible. Our wedding, like every wedding, was an act of man, not of God. It was not a holy sacrament. My father forced me into an agreement with Thomas, and when I was old enough and had understanding enough I revoked that agreement. I claim the right to be a free woman, with a soul equal to any man under God.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“It is the old smile of gritty courage that all women show who have gone through hard nights and come out without betrayal.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“But this world is changing. Perhaps by the time you are old enough to marry the world will hear a woman's voice. Perhaps she will not have to swear to obey in her wedding vows. Perhaps one day a woman will be allowed to both love and think.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“The more that I learn, the more sure I am that I have very much to learn...”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“Why not?’ She asks the most challenging questions that a woman can ask. ‘Why should I not read? Why should I not think? Why should I not speak?”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“But seeing those words that were first written, and scratched out, and rewritten again in print and bound into a book, I know that I love the process of writing and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world—this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“Viverei como uma mulher apaixonada e inteligente e levarei a minha paixão e a minha inteligência para tudo o que fizer.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“This is a woman who has not been tamed to be as others want; she has not been cut down to fit her circumstances.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“how it is that men, even thoughtful men, can sound as if they never consider anything but always simply know.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“feel that deep joy of a writer seeing her work in print for the first time. The absorbing private work has become public, it has stepped out into the world. It will be judged and I am full of confidence that it is good work.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world – this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer,’ she says. ‘For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“You must use what you have,' he says, the advice of a good man to a whore for time immemorial. 'You must use what you are allowed.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“This is God’s victory: not mine.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“I did not seek love with Thomas, but I did not resist it. And now I am trapped in desire like a butterfly with its feet in honey, and the more I struggle, the deeper I sink.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“I think my heart has broken, but I have offered the fragments to God.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“pure beauty, shining among the other girls”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known, and I remark on his perception.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer,” she says. “For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer. You are not an anchorite, a solitary saint, you are a preacher.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“God speaks to us individually, each and every one of us, that we need neither pope nor priest, nor bleeding statue, to find our way to faith. God is calling and we only have to listen. There are no clever tricks to forgiveness. There is only one way and there is only one Bible, and a woman can study it as well as a man.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“Learning is an ornament to a good woman, not a distraction.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“Nowhere in the Bible does it say that marriage is a sacrament,” Anne replies. “It was not God who joined us together. The priest says it was; but this is not true. This is the word of the church, not the Bible. Our wedding, like every wedding, was an act of man, not of God. It was not a holy sacrament.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen

“king himself is as sunny as the mornings. He declares that he is well again, much better,”
― Philippa Gregory, The Taming of the Queen