“The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.”

They are not royal. They just happen to have me as their aunt.

I don’t like to badmouth people. But I’m the head of a monarchy that began in the ninth century, and I’m apparently more modern than Chris Christie.

Let us not take ourselves too seriously. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom.

These wretched babies don’t come until they are ready.

It is as queen of Canada that I am here. Queen of Canada and all Canadians, not just one or two ancestral strains.

For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.

Think what we would have missed if we had never … used a mobile phone or surfed the Net — or, to be honest, listened to other people talking about surfing the Net.

In the turbulence of this anxious and active world many people are leading uneventful, lonely lives. To them dreariness, not disaster, is the enemy.

[Before each of numerous portrait sittings:] Now then, with teeth or without?

It is easy enough to define what the Commonwealth is not. Indeed this is quite a popular pastime.

When life seems hard, the courageous do not lie down and accept defeat; instead, they are all the more determined to struggle for a better future.

It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all.

I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

[On the 1982 intruder into her bedroom:] I realized immediately that it wasn’t a servant because they don’t slam doors.

It has turned out to be an annus horribilis.

I look around my neighborhood, and I see people hailing a cab or ordering their food and then paying for it all with their phone. I’ve read about that stuff for a really long time, and now it’s starting to become commonplace.

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It’s a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.

I still perform it in all my shows. I’ll do it as long as I’m breathing. I’m so proud it has stood the test of time.

Whether it’s good talk or bad talk about me, as long as your talking and making me the center of your world, I win.

I feel no different than I felt at 99, 98 or 97. Just because you live a long time, you get all this attention. Just because you survived? Of course, I survived a lot.

Good writing is about finding and exploiting anecdotes that resonate with the reader. In storytelling, it’s OK if you only make one point, as long as it’s a good one.

I have no urns, no dusty monuments; No broken images of ancestors, Wanting an ear, or nose; no forged tales Of long descents, to boast false honors from.

If I am confirmed, I am confident that my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee and I will maintain the focus on long-term price stability as monetary policy’s greatest contribution to general economic prosperity and maximum employment.