Top 40 Catherine Gilbert Murdock Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you don’t talk, there’s a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

2. “A croaking frog would be nice, particularly a frog that retained Florian’s dark eyes. I should keep it in a box and poke it occasionally with a stick; that would be satisfying indeed.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

3. “What is a staircase, but a corridor improved by elevation?”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

4. “I swear, every person I know gets far more satisfaction from doing good deeds than receiving them. Maybe that’s the whole point in the end, all of us putting up with good deeds, tolerating them as best we can, counting the minutes until we have the opportunity to reciprocate.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

5. “I ultimately decided to hold my tongue and settle instead for the comfort of ignorance. Not knowing the truth, I retained hope, and that hope I held like a smooth warm stone against my heart.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

6. “She says you’re not truly human until you’ve had your heart broken and you’ve broken someone’s heart.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

7. “And if I didn’t, I’d spend the rest of my life wondering who I could have turned into if only I’d had the guts to try.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

8. “That which is priceless has no cost.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

9. “It was like he was in a contest to see who could do the least work, only he was the only contestant.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

10. “I hate it when people make fun of me and it turns out they’re right.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

11. “And that’s where our conversation went from there, than God, both of us laughing our butts off at the thought of a hoops game between two teams on intravenous fluids. Which makes absolutely no sense at all; I know that. But that’s why it cheered me up, because it was so absolutely stupid. It cheered me up more than I’d ever thought I’d be cheered up again.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

12. “How many times I have wondered what my fate might have been had I accompanied my parents that rainy spring morning. Such musings, I recognise, are more than a trifle insane, for envisioning what might have been had no more connection to our own true reality than a lunatic has to a lemon.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

13. “Everyone I looked at, their whole lives, did exactly what they were supposed to do without even questioning it, without even wondering if they could do something different.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

14. “No matter how I prayed, no fairy godmother appeared. No elf or leprechaun or world-weary wizard materialised to provide the secret weapon against my foe. I remained alone in a mouse-infested cell, empty but for a pallet and the nightdress into which I now had to struggle.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

15. “I trust you are enjoying your stay in our castle?” I asked at last. “Would that I were, Your Highness. But I am afraid my sleep last night was quite troubled. This morning I identified the source of my bruises” – here he reached into a pocket of his waistcoat – “as a pea that had been tucked beneath my mattress.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

16. “Lord Frederick had been a stalwart member of the Montagne court since at least the time of my grandfather; this I knew. Even more, he had the marvellous ability to pull peppermint drops from my ears, which used to entertain me for hours.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

17. “It kind of struck me how great it would be to go out with a guy that size. And if you, you know, got tired of dating him, you could always use him as a house or something.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

18. “So it was that my life passed from the joyous realm of heaven to the choking and inescapable tortures of hell.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

19. “Why was it that jam always coated me so?”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

20. “If in this narrative I have not yet paid Queen Sophia adequate consideration, particularly given the unrelenting domination the woman would soon claim over every single element of my life, I offer this simple yet honest explanation: for fifteen unbroken years, my mother had toiled to protect me from the woman. It is remarkable, as I reflect upon my childhood, how utterly unaware I was of this situation while it transpired, the truth coming to my notice only in despondent hindsight.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

21. “I mulled on the tower-bound princess whose lover employed her hair as rope. My own curly locks – one of my better features, I will admit, better being a relative term – hung just past my shoulders, and barely draped over the windowsill.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

22. “How could Paolo think the queen and her ilk were my people? I had no more relation to them than a pigeon does to a flock of swans – or a vortex of vultures, which the castle’s denizens better resembled in both attire and attitude.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

23. “You can’t think about how much you have left to do because that’s just one thought, one sad thought, that’ll make you bummed out all day long. Instead you’ve got to think about how much you’ve already done.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

24. “How could I pretend to be someone else when I was already failing at being the person I already was?”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

25. “With every morsel I consumed, I was informed that princes most love slender young ladies. As I was as interested in a prince’s love as in sticking my fish fork into my ear, I reacted to this by cleaning my plate ever more thoroughly.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

26. “That is the delusion of which I speak! You wish the joys of true love upon every milkmaid and stable boy in your land, and yet you consign yourself and another to lives of pure misery that you might possess a well-proportioned ballroom.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

27. “Today exists between yesterday and tomorrow.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

28. “According to Montagne legend, the mountain has forever been the abode of giants. Long ago a traveling pair of sorcerers, husband and wife, scaled the cliff into the valley, and the woman cured the giants’ chilblains with ointments and the gift of fire. In gratitude, the giants built Chateau de Montagne out of the living rock of Ancienne, and from that castle the couple founded the kingdom of Montagne, using their magic to shield the country and its people from harm.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

29. “I’d promised myself that I’d really work on talking more, talking about uncomfortable things, because I could see from Brian how well things could work out if you did.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

30. “I could not help but wonder, that night and later, why my father would even mention my marrying someone who came from a country that my mother so obviously disliked. I recall wondering that distinctly, while somehow missing the obvious connection that this boy was a prince and that I, the niece of a king, was a princess.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

31. “But it turns out that even if I don’t talk a lot, when it’s something that matters I still have a lot to say.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

32. “I could not but wonder at the queen’s unprecedented civility, until I realized with a flush of shame that it was my own improved behavior that motivated hers. So it is that we in life determine our own treatment.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

33. “The day of the ball was spent preparing me much as one prepares a goose for Christmas, with the same ultimate effect.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

34. “Every fairy tale, it seems, concludes with the bland phrase “happily ever after.” Yet every couple I have ever known would agree that nothing about marriage is forever happy. There are moments of bliss, to be sure, and lengthy spans of satisfied companionship. Yet these come at no small effort, and the girl who reads such fiction dreaming her troubles will end ere she departs the altar is well advised to seek at once a rational women to set her straight.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

35. “I milked, of course, and did some work around the barn, and tried not to think about Brian, which was like trying not to breathe.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

36. “Finally I halted, my cloak soiled with grease and jam. Why was it that jam always coated me so?”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

37. “Better I would have been at pulling parsnips out of my nose than charming any man, even if I so desired it, even if I quadrupled my studies in her unique curriculum.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

38. “My downfall, inevitably, was triggered by food.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

39. “Bend like the sapling you are. With time we shall find your oaken core.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

40. “And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

41. “The situation collapsed completely at dinner one September evening. Perhaps it was the full moon that drove me to madness, or the gnawing, relentless emptiness of my heart. Whatever the trigger, the powder had been well packed, and my explosion, though shocking, was not altogether unexpected.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

42. “As for the queen, I had no more interest in her company than in plunging my face into a nest of hornets.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

43. “I could not help but notice that in this regard the book, inanimate though it was, cared more for my welfare than any human in the castle.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

44. “The truth that our futures are so often determined not by some grand design or deliberate strategy but by an ordinary run-of-the-mill head cold.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

45. “The starlings swooped, writing a poem across the heavens that only God could read.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock

46. “We talked of mice, the cat and I, and of the importance of napping.”

— Catherine Gilbert Murdock