Top 100 Cat Sebastian Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “He sits down on the stoop and nearly cries. He just wants juice.”

— Cat Sebastian

52. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

54. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

56. “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

57. “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

58. “He reads the demand for acceptance and basic rights, the rejection of shame and fear. He reads the calm rebuttal of all the usual arguments against homosexuality, and the statement that it makes no sense to argue against a thing that simply is.”

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “But here is Andy, laying himself bare, and Nick isn’t sure he’s ever seen anything so brave in his life. This is a man who plays it safe, a man who orders the same sandwich every day for lunch. And now he’s taking a risk, and he’s taking it for Nick.”

— Cat Sebastian

65. “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

66. “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

67. “He’s not sure why it matters that the book is from Mark. Maybe Eddie’s just lonely and desperate for conversation, and the book is an opportunity for that. Maybe he just doesn’t want Mark to think he’s dumb. It can’t be because Mark’s handsome, because Eddie’s been attracted to plenty of men, and never once has it made him want to read a book.”

— Cat Sebastian

68. “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

69. “Nobody had told him how much of his late thirties would involve lying on floors and crying.”

— Cat Sebastian

70. “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

71. “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

72. “Love, while a fine thing, might be little more than an accident. It was what came next that mattered.”

— Cat Sebastian

73. “He kept regular hours, avoided any human interaction more complicated than afternoon tea, and read for exactly thirty minutes before bed.”

— Cat Sebastian

74. “Pay me the compliment of trusting that I mean what I say.”

— Cat Sebastian

75. “He’s hard not to like. He’s a mess, but you get to be as old as me and you realize damn near everyone goes through a time when they’re a mess. Problem is that most people who haven’t had it happen to them yet think it’s virtue and clean living keeping them out of the gutter.”

— Cat Sebastian

76. “He thinks of Mark having to keep his own private life a secret for years. It’s the kind of secret that seals a person off from everyone around them. Eddie’s heart breaks a little for him.”

— Cat Sebastian

77. “Maybe you need to get rid of your idea of better. Your boots are better than mine, but they won’t fit my feet.”

— Cat Sebastian

78. “Nick’s the kind of person who reads an entire magazine, cover to cover, and then throws it away. It’s amazing what some people are capable of.”

— Cat Sebastian

79. “Nobody had been more surprised than Jack to discover that when he was happy, he wanted to make others happy. What a soggy lot of rubbish, but there you had it.”

— Cat Sebastian

80. “And then – oh, his kingdom for a pair of field glasses. The earl dropped the ax long enough to strip down to his shirtsleeves. That couldn’t be necessary, given the chill in the November air. But on another, purely aesthetic level, it was quite, quite necessary for this man to take off his clothes whenever the spirit moved him. Perhaps he ought to go the full distance and take his shirt off too. No sense in doing things by halves.”

— Cat Sebastian

81. “He took Page’s face in between his still-cold hands and stroked his thumbs over the man’s cheekbones. Too tenderly for a man this dangerous, too slow for people with no future.”

— Cat Sebastian

82. “I thought you were beautiful! I couldn’t believe how beautiful you were.” Beautiful and smart and a little mean, like he was made in a lab to lure Eddie to his doom. But instead of doom, it’s this: coffee and breakfast, a dog snoring on the carpet, the near certainty they’ll do this again.”

— Cat Sebastian

83. “They’re all going to wind up miserable at the end.” Nick appears over the back of the sofa, still holding a cast-iron frying pan and looking like he wants to grab the book from Andy’s hand. “No, they won’t. I read the final chapter.” “You did what?” Nick sounds scandalized. “I’m not wasting my time on things that make me sad.” He learned that lesson with Old Yeller, thank you very much.”

— Cat Sebastian

84. “Maybe Mark is wrong. Maybe this swing will slip away from Eddie, or maybe it will settle into something just above marginal, something good enough but never great. He knows better than to count on good things lasting. But when he watches Eddie – when he sees that stern set of his jaw, and when Eddie flashes a grin toward the bleachers – Mark thinks he’s seeing something that’s for keeps.”

— Cat Sebastian

85. “Leo was a weapon, and he didn’t care for the idea of being aimed by a stranger.”

— Cat Sebastian

86. “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

87. “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

88. “He had come to England as a child and had never really thought of himself as a Catholic, but it still struck him as vaguely debased that the churches here tended not to use incense.”

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

90. “Neat categories of valid relationships that everyone understood, phrases of belonging that could be etched concisely onto tombstones: beloved son, devoted wife. There were even rules for how to grieve people in each category, how many months to wear a black armband and whether one could dance. Captain Dacre didn’t have any of that, and Ben felt his heart twist in his chest at what that must cost him.”

— Cat Sebastian

91. “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

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

— Cat Sebastian

93. “Without the people who thought the best of him, he had forgotten how to think the best of himself.”

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

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

— Cat Sebastian

96. “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

97. “Men don’t mess around with other men in order to rule out queerness. Apart from some pretty limited exceptions – the army, the navy, fourteen-year-olds out of their minds with hormones – men who screw around with other men are doing it because they specifically want to screw around with men.”

— Cat Sebastian

98. “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

99. “Then tell me.” He’d fix it. Whatever it was, he’d move heaven and earth to make things right for her. Here he was sending her sweets and haberdashery, servants and barnyard fowl. Did she not understand that he would do more, if she would let him?”

— Cat Sebastian

100. “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