historindies:

This is part one of a many part series of lines and dialogue taken from The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Feel free to change pronouns or anything else to better suit your needs.

• But what can a virgin know of the sorrows and travail of mankind?
  
• My fingers ache! Why must I spin, spin, spin all the time, as if I were a waiting-woman?
  
• Romans make a great matter of worrying over who lay with their women.
  
• And why could you not come before, why did you leave me all alone?
  
• No single God can rule all things.
  
• The principle of woman, so they say, is the principle of all evil.
  
• There is some fantastic Jewish tale about an apple and a snake.
  
• Those who are the Lords of this world permitted me to come back, but in another body of flesh.
  
• But if men do not believe in more than one life, how will they avoid despair?
  
• What just God would create some men wretched, and others happy and prosperous, if one life were all that they could have?
  
• I will not let you play again at skipping-stones with my life!
  
• Do you think I will let you plot against my child’s life as you have plotted against mine?
  
• You are almost a woman, you must not behave like a spoilt child!
  
• Will you fly so recklessly in the face of fate?
  
• Such love we might well pray to be spared in a God.
  
• Will you walk the road to your destiny, or must the Gods drag you to it unwilling?
  
• And I suppose you will give me a charm so that he will fall so deep in love with me that he cannot resist it?
  
• You are young, and I do not think you have any idea how beautiful you are.
  
• She is a puppy bitch with eyes hot for anything in the shape of a man.
  
• I suspect he’s no good Christian.
  
• He’s a lecherous man with a dozen bastards, no woman’s safe around him.
  
• He’s soldier enough for a Caesar; the men will follow him through hell, if they have to.
  
• Have you a wish to be queen?
  
• You say that because you are too young to know what it means.
  
• I do not want to spend the rest of my lifetime at war.
  
• I like not the way he looks at you. He is no man for a decent woman to know. Avoid him.
  
• Forgive my clumsiness, lady. I am all too big to sit in your lap!
  
• I do not want to be old, and think of Heaven and peace, for they seem very dull to me. I want war and plunder and women – oh, yes, women – and the priests do not approve of any of those things.
  
• Do you truly think women know nothing of state matters?
  
• You will not play the shrew with me, madam!
  
• You will not speak to me in that voice or I shall beat you in earnest.
  
• Touch me at your peril, or I shall teach you that a daughter of the Holy Isle is no man’s slave nor servant!
  
• I trust him no further than I could kick his arse on a muddy day!
  
• I love you with a love that is stronger than death, and if sin is the price of binding us together, life after life across the ages, then I will sin joyfully and without regret.
  
• I will throw myself into the river before ever you touch me again!
  
• You lie, and you know you lie!
  
• You knave whose mouth and mind are as foul as your filthy kisses!
  
• Be silent, you evil-minded scold!
  
• Is that how you seduced my king into your arms?
  
• Do you think I would ever look at you again except with the loathing I would feel for a snake?
  
• Your Christian piety permits you to ravish your own wife!
  
• I could not bear it, that you should look like that at that lustful and vicious man, and look on me only with duty and resignation.
  
• I am innocent of whatever sins your evil mind believes I have committed!
  
• If you think so evil of me, that I am adulteress, witch, all these ill things, why then did you not rejoice at the prospect of getting quit of me so simply?
  
• Have you put some spell upon my manhood, you accursed bitch?
  
• I am no longer a pliant girl but a woman with a mind of her own, and perhaps he thinks you would be easier to deal with.
  
• Even should I never again look upon his face in this life, I am bound to him and I shall be so bound until I die.
  
• And I cannot believe the Goddess would have wrought this upheaval in my life, if I was never meant again to see him.
  
• Go and the Devil take you, so that you come not into my presence.
  
• Why should I waste my breath with a curse? I would as willingly bid you Godspeed to your own heaven, and may your God find more pleasure in your company than I do.
  
• Why do you seek to go where it is forbidden to go?
  
• Have you no words of love for me?
  
• I have waited so long – I had begun to fear it would never come, and now you have no word of love or look of kindness for me.
  
• Did I dream it, after all, that you loved me, wanted me?
  
• I do not want to frighten you, but I have dreamed so long of this moment.
  
• Surely the time for dreaming is over?
  
• And why, when first I looked upon your face, did I feel that I had known you before the world was made?
  
• You are my love, my wife, my queen. I swear to you by my crown and by my manhood, you shall be my queen and I will never take another woman before you or put you aside.
  
• You are my love and my lord and my king, and I will love you as long as I live, and as long thereafter as God wills.
  
• Whatever comes of this, I love you.
  
• I will kill him before he can touch you again.
  
• Sleep, my love. Sleep.
  
• Lie still, dear love, dawn is still far away.