Top 70 Cat Sebastian Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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. “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

18. “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

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. “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

29. “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

30. “It’s only a matter of time before she stands for parliament or becomes a criminal mastermind, so you ought to give her some honest work to keep her busy.”

— Cat Sebastian

31. “Because there have been two deaths, and that means I’ve missed an evil element right on my doorstep. Either my powers of observation are lamentably poor, or this evil element is so ingrained into the fabric of our lives here that it’s become invisible to me. And, James, I don’t know which is worse.”

— Cat Sebastian

32. “He wanted to memorize every inch of her, every curve and angle, the strong length of her thigh and the delicate bones of her wrist, storing up memories against a bleak and empty tomorrow. But that wasn’t how love worked. Love wasn’t a sum safely invested in the five percents. One couldn’t prevent future sorrow by capitalizing on present bliss. All he could do was have this moment, wring all the joy out of it, and then somehow continue after it was over.”

— Cat Sebastian

33. “The rules as we know them might work wonderfully for most people, but they’re absolute rubbish for anyone who’s a little different.”

— Cat Sebastian

34. “He took hold of Jack’s collar and bent down for a kiss. With each stroke of his tongue he thought, This is ours. It wasn’t something he was doing to Jack, or Jack was doing to him. Neither of them owned it. It was theirs. This was what he had wanted; as much as the physical pleasure he wanted the sense of shared desire, mutual longing.”

— Cat Sebastian

35. “I’d be delighted to turn traitor to my class,” Percy said easily. “Honestly, I’ve been wondering when you’d ask.”

— Cat Sebastian

36. “Leo had read this detective story and he had seen this film and knew that when you made the heirs gather together, they immediately started putting exotic poisons into one another’s tea. They simply couldn’t help themselves.”

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

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. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “I may have called in a few favors.” He was going to have to send a lavish flower arrangement to Mrs. Patel. Or possibly a set of throwing knives.”

— Cat Sebastian

48. “Cora, you’re going to give the poor man a fit,” Edith remonstrated. “He’s gone as white as a sheet. I’m too old to dig graves in the frozen ground.”

— Cat Sebastian

49. “Edith Pickering had the sort of austere features and fine bones that changed little with age.”

— Cat Sebastian

50. “This village,” James announced, “has too many damned secrets.” And with that, he stepped out into the snow.”

— Cat Sebastian