“-in New York, a cat could look at a king. Hell, a cat could get himself elected king. But in England, where people had windows reminding them of ancestors whose bones had long since gone to dust? In England, the country that had perfected the art of the devastating remark? In England, where the servants' entrance waited, where all ears were tuned for the tiniest wrong accent, where the exquisitely subtle vocabulary of Us and Them held ten thousand complicated traps, uspoken and unarguable?”

“Of France and England, did this king succeed;Whose state so many had the managing.That they lost France and made his England bleed.”

“O England,’ said Kiaya Khátún. Her voice, mellow and strong, held an accent or a mingling of accents Philippa was unable to name. ‘O England, the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of Servants and the Paradise of Women.’ She turned her splendid eyes on the soothsayer. ‘She will be like Avicenna, and run through all the arts by eighteen.”

“He had a hint of a British accent; either he was American and had been educated in England or was English and had been living in America too long. (Or he just could have been an asshole.)”

“[Poetry] is a field where England can take on all challengers.”

“Goodnight you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.”