I cannot know what the future will bring us,” he says in a rapid undertone. “I cannot know where you will be given in marriage, nor what life might hold for me. But I can’t let you go without telling you – without telling you at least once – that I love you.
Thomas More once told me: lion or king, never show fear or you are a dead man.
Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.
I would like you to have a beautiful day every day.
Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family like a faithful black hound?
But I warn you that a woman who seeks great power and wealth has to pay a great price, Perhaps you will be a great woman like Melusina, or Yolande, or like me; but you will be like all women; uneasy in the world of men.
You just decide. Just decide that you are not going to be a fearful woman and when you come to something that makes you apprehensive, you face it and walk towards it. Remember – anything you fear, you walk slowly and steadily towards it. And smile.
It matters not at all that I do not want to marry, that I am afraid of the wedding, afraid of consummating the marriage, afraid of childbirth, afraid of everything about being a wife. Nobody even asks if I have lost my childhood sense of vocation, if I still want to be a nun. Nobody cares what I think at all. They treat me like an ordinary young woman, bred for wedding and bedding, and since they do not ask me what I think, nor observe what I feel, there is nothing that gives them pause at all.
Learn you to die!” means consider how your death is meaningful, as your life is meaningful.
I am marrying the finest man I have ever known.” “It will cost you dear,” he warns. “It would be worse to lose him.
Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy.
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.
People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can.
Then life taught me a harder lesson, beloved: it is better to forgive an enemy than destroy him.
Ah, my dear, you are a good wife. You are my beauty. You are my only love.
I believe that to be a free woman is to be both passionate and intelligent; and I am a free woman at last.
Before God, I love you and cherish you more than anything in the world. Of course I want to marry you. I love you heart and soul.
A single man’s imperfect conscience can never be superior to centuries of tradition.
There was a magic: and the name of it was love.
You have to sit with your longing and know that you may not get what you want; you have to encounter the danger of longing for something without the expectation of getting your desire.