Margaret George quotes:

In my experience, there are two things that no one will admit to: having no sense of humor and being susceptible to flattery.

So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.

But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.

Kindness is stronger than iron bars.

Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine - that is, activity - which could solve it, is seen as odious.

Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.

Mary awoke from her nightmare with a pounding heart, convinced that she had only imagined Elizabeth's cruel plot. A full moon was shining into her chamber, illuminating everything around her in silvery light. That was when she noticed for the first time that there were bars on her window.

The cure for a broken heart is simple, my lady. A hot bath and a good night's sleep.

What is one person's diversion may be another's supreme test.

We are always tortured by our memory of the last time we were with anyone, what we said, what we did not say...

Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.

It is only when our fate hangs in the balance, when our very life depends on something, that we see whether or not we trust that the rope to which we are clinging will support us. If we do not, then we let of of the ledge and swing on it with our full weight.

Defeat I can endure with cheerfulness, my lady. But betrayal is like taking the wind from my sails, or the earth from beneath my feet. It chills my spirits like a rainy day, and all I can do is draw the curtains and cry into my pillow.

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.

I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.

I was ever the realist, sometimes to my sorrow. But seldom to my regret.

It is almost impossible to describe happiness, because at the time it feels entirely natural, as if all the rest of your life has been the aberration; only in retrospect does it swim into focus as the rare and precious thing it is. When it is present, it seems to be eternal, abiding forever, and there is no need to examine it or clutch it. Later, when it has evaporated, you stare in dismay at your empty palm, where only a little of the perfume lingers to prove that once it was there, and now is flown.

Lying in bed, half-covered by the blankets, I would drowsily ask why he had come to my door that night long ago. It had become a ritual for us, as it does for all lovers: where, when, why? remember...I understand even old people rehearse their private religion of how they first loved, most guarded of secrets. And he would answer, sleep blurring his words, "Because I had to." The question and the answer were always the same. Why? Because I had to.

Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one's human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death - in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.

Oh, he was just angry, we tell ourselves when someone blurts out something he later apologizes for. But a word, once spoken, lingers forever; to keep peace we pretend to forget, but we never do. Strange that a spoken word can have such lasting power when words carved on stone monuments vanish in spite of all our efforts to preserve them. What we would lose persists, lodged in our minds, and what we would keep is lost to water, moths, moss.

The most wicked criminals have God on their lips at all times, for God is the only one who can stomach them.

Things do not happen, we must make them happen

Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.

To love someone is to catch your breath whenever he walks in the room.

We are more than our bodies, it is true; but we cannot be divorced from them. They are us, and the only way in which we can see one another. Perhaps the gods are above this, but in their mercy, they have given us the guise of bodies.

When he comes into a room, you give a little gasp, deep inside, far inside,' someone once said when trying to describe what it meant to love.

Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.

The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.