“Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have.”

“When you pray, you know that you want something, that's always the first step. to let yourself know that you want something, that you yearn for it. sometimes that's the hardest thing to do. Because you have to have courage to know what you desire. You have to have courage to acknowledge that you are unhappy without it.”

“It is not love that matters, Mistress Boy, it is what you choose to do with it. What’d you choose to do with yours?”

“Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.”

“You have to have faith that you are doing God's will. Sometimes you will not understand. Sometimes you will doubt. But if you are doing God's will, you can't be wrong, you can't go wrong.”

“The wheel of fortune [...] tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.”

“I do think your brother grows more peculiar every day,' I complain to Edward when he comes to my rooms in Whitehall Palace to escort me to dinner.'Which one?' he asks lazily. 'For you know I can do nothing right in the eyes of either. You would think they would be glad to have a York on the throne and peace in Christendom, and one of the finest Christmas feasts we have ever arranged; but no: Richard is leaving court to go back north as soon as the feast is over, to demonstrate his outrage that we are not slogging away in a battle with the French, and George is simply bad tempered.”