Philippa Gregory, The White Queen

"This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years."

"I want to take you for pleasure, and hold you in my arms for desire. I want you to know that it is your kiss that I want, not another heir to the throne. You can know that I love you, quite for yourself, when I come to your bed, and not as the York’s broodmare.”I tilt back my head and look at him under my eyelashes. “You think to bed me for love and not for children? Isn’t that sin?”His arm comes around my waist and his palm cups my breast. “I shall make sure that it feels richly sinful."

"They are girls to whom things happen, and they take it hard. But I bear myself as more than a silly girl. I am the daughter of a water goddess. I am a woman with water in her veins and power in her breeding. I am a woman who makes things happen, and I am not defeated yet. I am not defeated by a boy with a newly won crown, and no man will ever walk away from me certain that he won’t walk back."

"There was a magic: and the name of it was love."

"Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy."

"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."

"Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free."

"There is no one who loves peace more than a soldier"

"He promised her that he would give her everything, everything she wanted, as men in love always do. And she trusted him despite herself, as women in love always do."