James Goldman Quotes

“Just you remember. Father loves me best.”

“Your little brother Philip is the King of France now and he wants your wedding dowry back. I only took you for your dowry. You were seven. [...] The Vexin is a little county but it’s vital to me.”

“You hardly know me, Johnny, so I beg you to believe my reputation: I’m a constant soldier and a sometime poet and I will be King.”

“Henry: Did the Channel part for you? Eleanor: It went flat when I told it to. I didn’t think to ask for more. How dear of you to let me out of jail.”

“I’ve snapped and plotted all my life. There’s no other way to be a king, alive and fifty all at the same time.”

“Poor John-who says poor John? Don’t everybody sob at once. My God, if I went up in flames, there’s not a living soul who’d pee on me to put the fire out.”

“You get Alais and you get the kingdom but I get the one thing I want most. If you’re king, England stays intact. I get that. It’s all yours now-the girl, the crown, the whole black bloody business. Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s going to be a jungle of a day: if I start growling now. I’ll never last.”

“When I married Eleanor, I thought: ‘You lucky man. The richest woman in the world. She owns the Aquitaine, the greatest province on the Continent - and beautiful as well.‘”

“He’ll leave me if he has to; I know that.”

“Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It’s 1183 and we’re all barbarians!”

“My, what a greedy little trinity you are: king, king, king. Two of you must learn to live with disappointment.”

“My position is - well frankly, Philip, it’s a tangle. Once I’m dead, who’s to be king? I could draw papers ‘til my scribes drop or the ink runs out, and once I died, unless I’ve left behind me three contented sons, my lands will split three ways in civil war.”

“Eleanor: After all the years of love, the hair I’ve brushed and braided and the tears I’ve kissed away, do you think I could bring myself to hurt you? Alais: Eleanor, with both hands tied behind you.”

“Alais: You saved them. You maneuvered it. Eleanor: Did I? Alais: They’re free because of you. They’ll kill him one day; you know that Eleanor: The next or the next.”

“Well, what family doesn’t have its ups and downs?”

“It’s a heavy thing, your nothing. When I write or send for you or speak or reach, your nothings come. Like stones.”

“Geoffrey: Why, you chivalric fool-as if the way one fell down mattered. Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.”

“You know what I am? I’m the family nothing. Geoffrey’s smart and Richard’s brave and I’m not anything.”

“For these ten years you’ve lived with everything I’ve lost and loved another woman through it all. And I’m cruel. I could peel you like a pear and God would call it justice ...”

“Well ‒ what shall we hang? The holly or each other?”