Top 100 Cat Sebastian Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Let me make this equally clear to you, because I think I’ve failed you on this score. I want to be with you, in rooms above a pub or anywhere you happen to be. A cave, a pirate ship, a desert island, doesn’t matter.”

— Cat Sebastian

52. “And if Andy hadn’t already known he loves Nick – if Andy had managed to tuck that truth away where he keeps everything else he doesn’t want to deal with – he would have known it then, watching Nick laugh with the butcher on a sunny May morning.”

— Cat Sebastian

53. “For the next few days, Andy is aware of having passed a point of no return, some kind of gay Rubicon.”

— Cat Sebastian

54. “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

55. “Andy’s had enough people putting him last and Nick isn’t going to be one of them.”

— Cat Sebastian

56. “The Chicken Basket,” Peter announced. “The sheep bucket,” Caleb declared promptly. “What game is this?”

— Cat Sebastian

57. “It’s not pity,” Eddie says. “And I don’t think I could have a single feeling about you that’s wasted.”

— Cat Sebastian

58. “But it wasn’t fear or curiosity that Lawrence read in Turner’s gaze. He was familiar with both those expressions, and this wasn’t either of them. Lawrence might not have any interest in interacting with his fellow man, but he was a student of science and he liked being able to classify and categorize. This look of Turner’s didn’t fit into any of the looks he was accustomed to receiving. It was something darker and lighter and colder and warmer all at once.”

— Cat Sebastian

59. “But finding out the truth wasn’t the goal – the truth was just another weapon, a knife to put in the right person’s hand, a grenade waiting to explode.”

— Cat Sebastian

60. “It’s not just the burden of continually lying, it’s keeping your existence a secret. When the world has decided that people are supposed to be a certain way, but you’re living proof to the contrary, then hiding your differences is just helping everybody else erase who you are.”

— Cat Sebastian

61. “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

62. “Maybe it was the dark and the quiet that let Billy start thinking about what this all meant, or maybe it was the way that being tucked under the same blanket made you feel like you were the only two people in the universe.”

— Cat Sebastian

63. “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

64. “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

65. “I want a life with you. I want this to be – I want more than we can have.” Andy is looking at him so carefully, too carefully. “But I want it anyway,” Nick admits.”

— Cat Sebastian

66. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

68. “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

69. “Now he knows who he is exactly and what he wants, and he knows exactly how high a price he’s willing to pay for those things. He’s tired and he’s angry, and his contentment is something heavy and sharp, a prize that he fought for. He wouldn’t exchange it for anything.”

— Cat Sebastian

70. “This is all new to me. I’m in a new world without a map or a chart, but you’re my compass, Ben, and I know we’ll find a way.”

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

85. “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

86. “He sits down on the stoop and nearly cries. He just wants juice.”

— Cat Sebastian

87. “You get older, and things change. That’s the price of admission. You lose the people who knew you first, and then you start to lose everyone else. You lose your work. You lose the place where you grew up. You get things in return – new people, new hobbies, a chance to see everything new that the world has to throw at you. But you lose the things you’ve had the longest, the things that went into making you.”

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

89. “You know, you’ve totally lost the ability to insult me and sound like you mean it,” Peter observed cheerfully. “It all comes out like sweet nothings.”

— Cat Sebastian

90. “Do you think I could write an advice column?” Ash strove to find a diplomatic way to say No, definitely not. “Well, perhaps of the more bracing sort. Some people do like being flogged. Specialized interest, you know.”

— Cat Sebastian

91. “He really was an idiot, but he was an idiot for Tommy Cabot, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.”

— Cat Sebastian

92. “We no longer have the energy to hide. You can’t know the strain on a person in always pretending.”

— Cat Sebastian

93. “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

94. “This urge to be kind to a relative stranger is unfamiliar and disconcerting, as if he’s discovered in himself a hunger for raw meat or an enthusiasm for vaudeville.”

— Cat Sebastian

95. “Julian felt about Courtenay’s looks the way radicals thought about money: that it was deeply unfair and problematic for one person to possess such a disproportionate share.”

— Cat Sebastian

96. “The man meant to stay here, to meddle and talk and distract; he planned to smell good and be handsome and obviously Lawrence should never have agreed to any of this.”

— Cat Sebastian

97. “Nobody dies in Austen,” Page said, as if that were reason enough to read and enjoy something. “Nobody who appears on page, that is. She keeps all her tragedy off page,” he said approvingly. “On page, it’s all very much like this,” he said, gesturing out the window once again at the rolling hills of the Cotswolds.”

— Cat Sebastian

98. “Maybe the trick is to put fear in its place so it doesn’t take over. He can relegate the vice cops and petty rumors to the same corner of his mind where he puts atom bombs and other lurking evils.”

— Cat Sebastian

99. “Andy flashes Nick a smile, a thousand watts of professionally straightened teeth, and it’s like a two-by-four to the head. It takes Nick a minute to arrange his face.”

— Cat Sebastian

100. “Their lips met with more urgency than finesse, and Phillip didn’t care because he had gone too many years with too few kisses, and he had gone his whole life without Ben, and now he had kisses and Ben and he had never felt better.”

— Cat Sebastian