“We have all felt those emotions in these last few days. So what I say to you now, as your queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.”

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.

Maybe one day you’ll see, you’ll see what I saw.

Make kindness your priority. Practice it every day,

On some days, getting up to face the day itself is a big win for your heart.

Sometimes, we conquer our days. Other times, we are brave just for making it through.

Every day is an up and down spiral I have become a hurricane coming in with no warning ceasing to understand where my destruction has come from at all.

Some days it is exhausting to simply exist.

If you’ve ever climbed mountains, in the most intense storms. And all they ever did was walk up a hill on a clear day for you, you have so much love in you. Never settle for the hill for someday, someone will be at the top of the mountain.

The day I know who I am, why and how is known of me, I will be me, Me: free from thorns and petals that go round and round, in heads and heels, and would reveal me, me indeed!