Top 100 Cat Sebastian Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “My head is a mess.” Page stepped closer. “That’s all of us, mate.”

— Cat Sebastian

2. “I just wish you cared for yourself as much as I do. I wish you cared for anything as much as I cared for you.”

— Cat Sebastian

3. “She’s not a peaceable woman, my mother. She wrote that book because she didn’t think the world needed another generation of peaceable women, or complacent adults of any gender. I do wish she could see Leontine.”

— Cat Sebastian

4. “Missing you is profoundly inconvenient, I’ll have you know. I have things to do and places to be, and all the while I’ll feel like I’ve mislaid a piece of my soul and I won’t get it back until I see you again. That can’t be normal.”

— Cat Sebastian

5. “What I mean is that if we try to mend this” – oh, God help him, he was about to launch into an extended engineering metaphor – “we need to make sure it’s, um, structurally sound. Better than before. No gaps in knowledge or intent.”

— Cat Sebastian

6. “It looks like a gingerbread house assembled by a thoroughly mad child,” Page said. He took a puff from his cigarette and stepped a few paces to the side as if to survey the house from a different angle. “I love it.”

— Cat Sebastian

7. “That had made him very cross indeed, because all James wanted to do was keep his head down and avert his eyes from any unpleasantness, and here she was practically forcing him into action.”

— Cat Sebastian

8. “Imagine Sir Walter Scott, but if every woman in English history dabbled in witchcraft or murder.”

— Cat Sebastian

9. “That was how it was when your soul was in pieces and somebody else had one of them. Only when you were together would the pieces fit into place and become whole.”

— Cat Sebastian

10. “No, I assure you that I’m farther gone than most. And I wasn’t even a soldier. All I did was, as you said, stitch people up. What right do I have to – ” “No.” Page laid a hand on his shoulder. “What you’re not going to do is talk about shell shock or combat fatigue or brain fuckery as if it’s a special treat that you haven’t earned.”

— Cat Sebastian

11. “All this fuss about a couple of small explosions.”

— Cat Sebastian

12. “Falling in love wasn’t like a bird hatching from an egg, for all both events were rather messy and fraught with vulnerability.”

— Cat Sebastian

13. “Yes, that was how it was when your soul was in pieces and somebody else had one of them.”

— Cat Sebastian

14. “A stone in the prettiest, best-kept garden hid things one was better off not knowing – best for everyone not to lift that stone at all.”

— Cat Sebastian

15. “Hear me now, Oliver Rivington. You will not use gestures with me.”

— Cat Sebastian

16. “They were still standing too close. Turner tipped his head against the wall and looked up at Lawrence with lazy indifference. Most unsecretarial. But Turner didn’t seem afraid, and Lawrence didn’t know how to feel about that. He was so accustomed to fear that the absence of it was unsettling.”

— Cat Sebastian

17. “He couldn’t be serious and stern with a man who had ducklings in his hair, or who talked to baby birds like they were guests at a tea party, or who seemed to dearly want Phillip to smile.”

— Cat Sebastian

18. “Oh, to hell with decent people. They’re exhausting. Make one feel so evil, when really one simply has one’s own concerns.”

— Cat Sebastian

19. “In any event,” Percy went on, “what I had thought were principles were merely manners, and they’re utterly insufficient for my present circumstances.”

— Cat Sebastian

20. “He smelled of carbolic soap and tea, which Leo thought was the most honest thing in the world for a man to smell like, and he was never going to have tea or wash his hands without thinking of this man.”

— Cat Sebastian

21. “There, now my principles are in confusion and I hate it.”

— Cat Sebastian

22. “Nobody ever thinks I’m up to no good. I let them think whatever they want and they fill in the gaps themselves.”

— Cat Sebastian

23. “It was his professional opinion that all you had to do was scratch a snoop and find a blackmailer, and blackmail complicated matters dreadfully.”

— Cat Sebastian

24. “James was quite confident that nobody had ever enjoyed a conversation with Colonel Armstrong as much as Leo Page was pretending to.”

— Cat Sebastian

25. “Honor was a luxury item, like hair pomade and snuff. Its only purpose was to show the world that you could afford to be impractical, that you had enough money to behave in a way that was compatible with some ludicrous code instead of acting out of self-preservation like the rest of humanity.”

— Cat Sebastian

26. “He didn’t have the imagination to orchestrate illicit liaisons, nor the cunning to do anything sly. He had all the subtlety of a puppy, all the capacity for guile of a newborn baby.”

— Cat Sebastian

27. “He tended to think that when the Bible condemned something practically everyone did, whether it be tossing oneself off or eating pork, there was likely some nuance that had been lost either to history or to translation. And then he didn’t think about it anymore.”

— Cat Sebastian

28. “She pulled a wad of knitting out of her work basket and began stitching as if the wool had done her a gross injustice and being made up into a muffler was a proper revenge.”

— Cat Sebastian

29. “Percy realized he had had it all wrong when he told Kit that honor is just spite dressed up; spite was honor when it was the only weapon you had against someone more powerful.”

— Cat Sebastian

30. “Perhaps Mr. Goddard does not understand that people can amuse themselves by hurling polite insults at one another and accusing one another of sloppy research and utter illogic.”

— Cat Sebastian

31. “I used to think that revenge was about defending one’s honor, but it turns out that honor is just spite dressed up for Sunday.”

— Cat Sebastian

32. “Percy was somehow still young or naive enough to think that there was any difference between being strong and acting strong.”

— Cat Sebastian

33. “Lawrence had a hard time attending to the man’s words. Turner himself was as much an intrusion as his stacks. Lawrence’s gaze drifted unwillingly to the secretary’s face, taking in the sweep of dark lashes, the dimple that appeared on one cheek as he smiled – oh, damn it.”

— Cat Sebastian

34. “One knows things are bad when one’s blackmailer sympathizes.”

— Cat Sebastian

35. “That time is gone, that version of himself is gone, and there’s nowhere to go but forward.”

— Cat Sebastian

36. “This isn’t a book about deportment. It’ll have any child deporting themselves right out of polite society,” he said. “And right into prison, if my mother’s any example.”

— Cat Sebastian

37. “That’s the thing about walls. They don’t tend to appear for no good reason; they’re either closing something off or holding something up, and you can’t just wish them away.”

— Cat Sebastian

38. “But he also wants that feeling he had earlier, that feeling of being seen for who he is, and of being liked anyway.”

— Cat Sebastian

39. “There had been a time when he thought of himself as an arm of justice, but now he knew he was more like a cat bringing home a mouse to leave on his owner’s pillow.”

— Cat Sebastian

40. “Only two things in the world people count by months. How old a baby is, and how long since something awful happened.”

— Cat Sebastian

41. “If the old lady who’s been giving me tea and biscuits for twenty-five years is a trained assassin, I suppose I might like assassins after all. I might have very positive and warm associations with assassins.”

— Cat Sebastian

42. “He being decent to you? I’ll murder him if he isn’t. Wait. Are you being decent to him? I’ll murder you both if you hurt one another.”

— Cat Sebastian

43. “Leo knew that unpicking secrets meant unraveling a length of fabric or cutting out the secret entirely, creating a tear, a rift, a wound. That gaping absence was the cost of a secret.”

— Cat Sebastian

44. “You’re allowed to be imperfect. Anybody who expects perfection secretly likes being disappointed in people.”

— Cat Sebastian

45. “Ash understood that he and Verity could never be together, and he accepted as the logical and reasonable conclusion that she would seek the company of other people. Indeed, he wished her well, in a theoretical sort of way.”

— Cat Sebastian

46. “He wants to tell Nick that he loves him, but his entire experience with that phrase is that it does nothing to stop anyone from leaving.”

— Cat Sebastian

47. “The real Lord Pembroke wanted to read lurid novels and cuddle on the sofa. All this lord-of-the-manor business was because he was embarrassed by his father’s excesses and anxious about providing for those who would have been cut off without a groat if he hadn’t stepped in to shore up the estate’s finances.”

— Cat Sebastian

48. “Back at the motel, all of Caleb’s restraint disappeared as soon as the door shut behind them. He pushed Peter against the wall. He seemed to have developed a fondness for pushing Peter into things and then kissing him, and Peter at the same time had developed a fondness for getting pushed against things.”

— Cat Sebastian

49. “There are so very few perfect things in the world that it seems only right to share them.”

— Cat Sebastian

50. “A couple times a year, Nick finds a tale of gay misery and woe on his desk, because apparently Bailey has taken it upon himself to be Nick’s personal sad gay librarian.”

— Cat Sebastian