When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.
I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: Not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen.
One’s lover is one’s partner in observing and understanding the world. Marriage is a place where joint narratives are composed. If the lover is a liar then all your joint observations are unreliable. You will have to start all over again.
But I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.
I love going to London for a couple of days but I need to be in the country. I like the silence, the smell and the seasonal changes, especially in spring and summer. I really feel that I belong there.
I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.
Sometimes you cannot help what you hear, you cannot help what you see.
We might, either of us, be Queen of England and yet we’ll always be nothing to our family.
Being a stepmother has worked out very well for me. I love my stepchildren very much.
One never gets the same summer twice.
I would be very, very uncomfortable at teaching, at dreaming to teach, people things.
Anyone can attract a man. The trick is to keep him.
I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.
To save my son, I would plot with the devil himself.
I’m utterly indifferent to Kate Middleton’s baby.
Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.
Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.
He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.
Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.
I love reading and I love thinking – the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.