“When I need it, I can call bitterness around me like mail armor, every thought a knot of steel, shielding the tenderness I have learned to hide as a daughter, mother, wife, and queen among warriors.”

“Sorrow and life go hand in hand.”

“Was Charles I too stubborn to listen to reason? Could Civil War have been averted if the king had been more willing to negotiate? His great enemy Cromwell always maintained that the king had been swayed at the last moment by his queen, the beautiful Henrietta Maria. We can believe Cromwell's claim that the queen told her husband to be firm. But the wicked, spiteful, altogether irresistable quote often attributed to her by Puritan writers of the time is almost certainly false. "Oh my love, if you cannot remain firm in the bedchamber, at least try to remain firm with your subjects!”

“Imagine this: imagine you discover that for many years another person intimately shared your life without your knowing it. Oh, you had your suspicions – the indented pillow beside you, the toothpaste with a thumbprint that wasn’t yours. Now it all fits, you know it’s true, but during all that time you never actually saw this person. And so it is with me. She was my shadow-self, unknown to me. She knew passion where I knew only inhibition, then grief where I knew guilt, then terror where I knew anger. She monitored my every thought, manipulated my actions, aided my survival and sabotaged my dreams, for she was I and I was she. (228)”

“All those stories need different endings——which is possible because it's my life and I do have the privelege of being able to write the story.”

“I have seen all, I have heard all, I have forgotten all." - Marie Antoinette”

“Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.”