Top 160 Courtney Milan Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There is no point getting angry at a bad hand, he had used to say. Especially if the dealer cheated when distributing the cards. Anger leads to mistakes. Don’t get angry; that’s what they want. Get calm. They’ll never expect you to do that. Don’t get angry; get creative. Take the hand you have and see whether you might not be holding something your enemy has overlooked. Don’t get angry at the cards; get the dealer out of the game.”

— Courtney Milan

102. “Hugo reached down and plucked a spare twig from the ground and set it on the bench between them. “This,” he said, “is a wall, and I will not cross it.”

— Courtney Milan

103. “If that door opens now, of course,” he murmured in her ear, “I can step away and only the flush in your cheeks will raise suspicion.” His hands continued to chart a dangerous course over her body. He stroked her, caressed her, until she strained against him. He kissed the back of her neck. “So I think we should remove any doubt as to what is happening.”

— Courtney Milan

104. “I would never interrupt you,” he told her. “I love it when you talk Sweetly to me.”

— Courtney Milan

105. “Here was life, gently reminding her that she could care again. That her grief was allowed, but so was her joy.”

— Courtney Milan

106. “And she’d discovered she wasn’t empty inside. She was magnificent. Even if nobody yet recognized it.”

— Courtney Milan

107. “I’m Edward Clark. Born Edward Delacey. Now, apparently, Viscount Claridge.” He shut his eyes. “You can address me by my preferred title: you idiot.”

— Courtney Milan

108. “We’re all self-serving.′ Camilla shrugged. ‘It’s just a matter of what we do to others in service of ourselves.”

— Courtney Milan

109. “No woman has ever needed a man to be enough.”

— Courtney Milan

110. “Miss Marshall spent her life daring those more powerful than her to swat her down. The hell of it was, her determination was some kind of contagion. He could feel it infecting him, making him believe. Making him tell himself lies like ‘I could do some good’ and ‘I want her forever’.”

— Courtney Milan

111. “His cooking had always been excellent, but the addition of spite to every recipe had brought an extra level of brilliance.”

— Courtney Milan

112. “If I had married, there is much I would not have learned of myself. This has been hard and painful and horrible. But I’ve learned that I’m stronger than hard, better than pain, and that with enough luck, horrible can go away.”

— Courtney Milan

113. “He wasn’t sure what he was saying, either, but he felt as if he were slipping into some dangerous world – one where answers ceased to be easy.”

— Courtney Milan

114. “Good thing he’s not your boyfriend, though, Tina. He’s so skinny, I think a condom would pop right off.”

— Courtney Milan

115. “It reminded him of the cacophony of an orchestra as it tuned its instruments: dissonance, suddenly resolving into harmony. It was the rumble, not of thunder, but its low, rolling precursor, trembling on the horizon.”

— Courtney Milan

116. “She will have to want to do it, want it enough that she won’t quit midway. She’ll have to want it enough that she’ll work through all the frustration so she can persevere to the end. When you need someone to have a will of her own, you can’t just bend her to yours.”

— Courtney Milan

117. “Oh, dear.” Free looked down, fluttering her eyelashes demurely. “Is my punctuation showing once more?”

— Courtney Milan

118. “For years, every conversation she had with a man had been colored by calculation. Would she put him off is she spoke her mind? What did he want her to say? When a man took a mistress, he purchased not just the rights to her body, but the content of her thoughts. Sir Mark wanted her as she was, not as he wished her to be. The thought made her head hurt.”

— Courtney Milan

119. “You see so many surprising things and you think they’re obvious.”

— Courtney Milan

120. “When someone falls,” Mark said, “you don’t throw her back down in the dirt. You offer her a hand up. It’s the Christian thing to do.”

— Courtney Milan

121. “I think we may have started this conversation off on the wrong foot,” Robert said finally. In fact, if the conversation had been animate, the merciful thing to do would have been to take it out behind the barn and shoot it.”

— Courtney Milan

122. “Men touch their horses to calm them,” she said distantly. “They caress their falcons to remind them that they are bound. Touch smacks of ownership, and I am weary of being a possession.”

— Courtney Milan

123. “You said that I didn’t notice people like you.” His voice lowers. His eyes are relentlessly blue, and they cut into me. “That’s completely false. You’ve never been invisible to me. I saw you the first day we crossed paths, and I’ve been seeing you ever since.”

— Courtney Milan

124. “And your mom?” Blake clears his throat. “She’s not with us.” I remember the conversation Blake and I had on the way down and tense. I can only imagine what my mother will say. But my mother just smiles brilliantly. “That’s good! Too many boys your age get spoiled by their mothers. They don’t know how to cook, how to do laundry. Tina is going to be a busy doctor. She’ll need someone to do all that for her. Better if you’re not used to having someone else take care of you.”

— Courtney Milan

125. “His voice was low. “Damn their bonnets. Damn their rules.” “What do you want?” Her hands were shaking. “Why are you doing this to me?” “Miss Lowell, you magnificent creature, I want you to paint your own canvas. I want you to unveil yourself.”

— Courtney Milan

126. “Sometimes she was absentminded. Sometimes it was far better to be absent from reality than present for its harshest truths.”

— Courtney Milan

127. “I’m not a fair woman,” she choked out. “I want impossible, contradictory things. I’m all hard edges, Sebastian. Hard edges and crumpled pieces and broken pieces of glass. There is no way for you to win this.”

— Courtney Milan

128. “She felt as if she’d opened a door on what she believed was a towering monster, only to find it five inches tall.”

— Courtney Milan

129. “I like all your worst qualities.”

— Courtney Milan

130. “I wasn’t going to be a bit of rubbish just because he discarded me.”

— Courtney Milan

131. “Every girl has dreams. Every woman learns to pack them up.”

— Courtney Milan

132. “She walked away from him with swift, sure strides, as if she knew her destination. As if it had nothing to do with him.”

— Courtney Milan

133. “I think she’ll fit quite well. As wives go, Miss Pursling will be just like these books. When I wish to take her down and read her, she’ll be there. When I don’t, she’ll wait patiently, precisely where she was left. She’ll make me a comfortable wife, Ames. Besides, my mother likes her.”

— Courtney Milan

134. “I knew perfectly well what you meant,” Sebastian said. “But I’ve always found that the quickest way to make someone relent in his foolish edicts is to take every command literally and to perform it with flagrant obedience.”

— Courtney Milan

135. “The great benefit I see to marrying you is that I would be married to you. I.”

— Courtney Milan

136. “I hate having second thoughts,” he muttered. “Necessary, for second chances,” Dalrymple put in.”

— Courtney Milan

137. “Robert was good at many things. Communicating with women was not one of them. “That’s not what I meant,” he muttered.”

— Courtney Milan

138. “He wanted her to lift her head at this moment. He wanted her to look him in the eyes and realize that he loved her. He wanted her to love him back.”

— Courtney Milan

139. “Standing this close to her, he could begin to see the difference. She was still looking down, still acting shy and quiet so that anyone more than three paces away would have no idea what she was saying. But there was a little more excitement in her hands. Her lips twitched, on the verge of smiling.”

— Courtney Milan

140. “I was worried that my brilliant good looks and easy manners would make me impossible to hate, thus ruining our fragile alliance. But this will be simple. Just tell me all the subjects you are an expert in, and I shall endeavor to explain them to you.”

— Courtney Milan

141. “But the sort of honor Richard was talking about was flattery, not truth. It wasn’t real. Honor that was given to you because of how you were born – that was just a delusion. She wasn’t going to rely on Parliament – or the people around her – to provide an assessment of herself. They were fickle and untrustworthy.”

— Courtney Milan

142. “Then I’ll have to succeed three times as hard as they want me to fail. You, of all people, should understand that.”

— Courtney Milan

143. “British people love their non-British sauces, as long as they don’t know they’re not British.”

— Courtney Milan

144. “But the Duke of Clermont was smiling and cheerful, and he’d thrown it out there as if it were merely one more fact to be recounted. The weather is lovely. The streets are paved with cobblestone. Your tits are magnificent.”

— Courtney Milan

145. “He held her for a minute, then two, then three, simply holding her and committing to memory what he could not have in life.”

— Courtney Milan

146. “Because even though you’ve been invisible to the entire world,” he said, “I have always seen you.”

— Courtney Milan

147. “Family isn’t a matter of history. Or biology,” he said softly. “It’s a matter of choice. And don’t look so grim. You know what I meant. Just because I refuse to let that man be my father doesn’t mean you can’t be my brother.”

— Courtney Milan

148. “It took some real inattention to detail, reality, and history to call either the Chinese or the varied nations that made up what Britain called India uncivilized, but then English propriety was that rare combination of inattention to everything that mattered coupled with a minute fascination with everything that didn’t.”

— Courtney Milan

149. “If people did not fear me so, how could anyone tolerate me?”

— Courtney Milan

150. “One could push a pack of truths together to make one despicable falsehood.”

— Courtney Milan