Claire Underwood quotes from House of Cards

Claire Underwood

My husband doesn't apologize, even to me.

Claire Underwood

You know what Francis said to me when he proposed? I remember his exact words. He said, 'Claire, if all you want is happiness, say no. I'm not gonna give you a couple of kids and count the days until retirement. I promise you freedom from that. I promise you'll never be bored.' You know, he was the only man - and there were a lot of others who proposed - but he was the only one who understood me. He didn't put me on some pedestal. He knew that I didn't want to be adored or coddled. So he took my hand and put a ring on it. Because he knew I'd say yes.

Claire Underwood

[to Gillian] I am willing to let your child wither and die inside you, if that's what's required. Now tell me, am I a sort of enemy you want to make?

Claire Underwood

[discussing her rape] When he was on top of me, I pressed my hand with everything I could, I pressed it into his face. I pressed it so hard, I broke his nose. That didn't stop him. He shoved the sheets in my mouth. I could barely breathe. Every time I think of her, pinned down like that, I strangle her, Francis, so she doesn't strangle me.

Claire Underwood

I've done what I have to do. Now you do what you have to do. Seduce him, give him your heart. Cut it out and put it in his fucking hands!

Claire Underwood

Thirty years from now, when you're dying in hospice care, you can look back and be proud of all the lives you saved. Or you can be forgotten, clutching onto the past with your cold, dead hands.

Claire Underwood

The older I get, I learn that assumptions are dangerous.

Claire Underwood

[to the audience] Just to be clear, it's not that I haven't always known you were there. It's that I have mixed feelings about you. I question your intentions. And I'm ambivalent about attention. But don't take it personally. It's how I feel about most everybody.

Claire Underwood

My turn.

Claire Underwood

It's not true, what he told you all those years ago: that there are two kinds, useful and useless. There's only one kind. Pain is pain. Francis, I'm done with you. [she opens her hand and releases the bird she was holding] There, no more pain.

Claire Underwood

Are you still there? Whatever Francis told you over the last five years, don't believe it. It's going to be different for you and me. I'm going to tell you the truth.

Claire Underwood

I know, you want to know what really happened to him. A man like Francis doesn't just die. That would be... what's the word? Convenient.

Claire Underwood

[after threatening a politician] I promised myself I wouldn't be like him. That was textbook Francis, wasn't it? But he handed me to them like a shaker of salt, and now they won't let go. This is a wound of their own making.

Claire Underwood

[about Usher] I look at him sometimes and picture him at 6 years old. Was he always so deliberative, cautious? I think, "In another life, in some other context, might we have been friends?"

Claire Underwood

Playing incompetent is so exhausting.