Top 150 Deanna Raybourn Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “He was no respecter of institutions simply because they boasted antiquity. He believed, like all good radicals, that everything ought to be examined anew by each generation. What served society should be retained, and what did not should be discarded without sentiment or reserve.”

— Deanna Raybourn

102. “Why? Death is part of life, child. It is not the end. It is not even the middle. It is merely a doorway. Alice is no further away from me than if she had stepped into the next room.”

— Deanna Raybourn

103. “There are not going to be any intimate activities,” Stoker said. “We are going there to work, not to participate in an orgy.” Tiberius lifted his brows. “My dear boy, if you only ‘participate’ in an orgy, you are doing it incorrectly. One must join such endeavors with enthusiasm or not at all.”

— Deanna Raybourn

104. “And so I did not try. De Clare was a lost soul; I had seen too clearly the glint of obsession in his eyes. It was the expression worn by fanatics and evangelists the world over, the dogged determination to see only one point of view and entertain no truths but the fantasy in one’s own mind. He would see this thing through to the end, no matter how many people it destroyed.”

— Deanna Raybourn

105. “It is seldom that a gentleman raises the subject of sewage so early in a conversation, I reflected.”

— Deanna Raybourn

106. “Sometimes I helps a few of the other girls out,” she told him, raising her chin. “Long Bet needed new boots last week, and Mary Jane lacked a few shillings to renting her own room. She’s got a snug little place of her own, just around the corner,” she added. The dreams in this part of the city were as small and pinched as the faces. Four walls to call one’s own. A hot meal, a pair of shoes with sound soles.”

— Deanna Raybourn

107. “It’s a comfortable place, mediocrity. Never pushing oneself to the limit to see what you can take. Never staring down your fears, never reaching into yourself to find that last bit of courage. You don’t even know what it is that you’re made of-and what’s more, you seem distinctly uninterested in finding out.”

— Deanna Raybourn

108. “You are not among the good that has happened to me. You are the best of all that I have known. You are what I searched for when I left that house and wandered this earth, boy and man. You are the part of myself I never thought to find because I did not even dare to dream you existed. You are all that I want and more than I deserve, and I will go to my grave thanking a god in whom I do not believe for bringing me you.”

— Deanna Raybourn

109. “Be brave. You have everything you need,” I murmured to no one in particular. “Everything indeed.” Excelsior!”

— Deanna Raybourn

110. “It takes courage to live a good life, Harry, but it also takes courage to live like a blackguard. Both require difficult choices. Both require hardship and endurance and patience. There is, in the end, little difference between the good and the bad. Only one of these lives requires you to look over your shoulder all the while and the other one makes it a little easier to sleep at night.”

— Deanna Raybourn

111. “Fecklessness! We are never feckless,” I told her coldly. “We are full to the brim with feck.”

— Deanna Raybourn

112. “Because she doesn’t apologize for anything. She had a rotten start in life, but she’s made the best of it. She lives on her own terms. She knows who she is and what she wants, and she does what she is good at. And she has a good time doing it.”

— Deanna Raybourn

113. “My dear child, it is never finished. Our enemies are cunning and careful. and they are legion.”

— Deanna Raybourn

114. “You have health and beauty and wit so sharp a man might cut himself and think the bleeding a privilege.”

— Deanna Raybourn

115. “She might be less than what she had once been, but she was still worth a hell of a lot.”

— Deanna Raybourn

116. “The female of the species is just as prey to the passions of the flesh as the male, and with greater cause, as it is her responsibility to propagate.”

— Deanna Raybourn

117. “Ah, do not mistake solitude for loneliness,” he advised. “A man may be lonely in a crowd, or he can be quite content in the society of the natural world.”

— Deanna Raybourn

118. “You can, and you will. Women are every bit as capable of killing as men. And you have advantages that men do not. You are all attractive young women, and your appearance means men underestimate you. You will use this to your advantage.”

— Deanna Raybourn

119. “He was entirely happy alone. He had his books and his music and his specimens, and that was all he needed. He also carried on a wide correspondence. His friends were far flung across the globe, but none of them intimate.”

— Deanna Raybourn

120. “Perhaps I have simply decided that if such misadventures are the price I must pay to have you in my life, I am content to pay them.”

— Deanna Raybourn

121. “I’m a woman. Guilt is our birthright.”

— Deanna Raybourn

122. “An honest wood fire was a joy too little encountered, I reflected.”

— Deanna Raybourn

123. “What, I began to wonder, was the point of allowing a gentleman access to one’s bed and heart if he could not interpret a lady’s most irrational moods?”

— Deanna Raybourn

124. “One seldom finds something if one never actually looks for it.”

— Deanna Raybourn

125. “Necessity will always triumph over nerve in a person of character, I reflected.”

— Deanna Raybourn

126. “Veronica Speedwell, I meant it then and I mean it now and I shall mean it with every breath until my last. I love you.”

— Deanna Raybourn

127. “It’s morning,” he murmured sleepily. “The first morning.” He said nothing else, but I understood him. This was the first morning we had awakened in each other’s arms, but it was more than that. This was the first morning ever, the beginning of all creation as far as I was concerned. A new life for us had begun, hand in hand, arm in arm, facing down the rest of the world. What adventures would await us!”

— Deanna Raybourn

128. “If you really believed that God preserved you in order to see this scheme to fruition, you are even more delusional than I first thought,” I said in considerable exasperation. “It is impossible to argue with a mind that does not admit scientific fact and relies instead upon dogma delivered by the hand of an invisible author.”

— Deanna Raybourn

129. “She sees the indignity of old age, how life becomes very small until there is nothing left of independence and power and beauty and freedom except a shell of a body that relies upon others for everything. It is terrible to witness.”

— Deanna Raybourn

130. “He was not another half, for I was whole unto myself. But he was my mirror, and in him I saw reflected all that I liked best in me. I saw honesty and pride, loyalty, and a willingness to stand, however difficult, in service of one’s principles. He was a twin soul to my own, and if I had not loved him so much, I would never have feared so much losing him.”

— Deanna Raybourn

131. “If you are trying to frighten me, I assure you, my imagination is every bit as Gothic as yours. I can well imagine the poisoned tea or the slim dagger in the night and the claims that I succumbed to a fever while everyone rallies around my infant,” I said repressively.”

— Deanna Raybourn

132. “Instead we were cooped up like hapless chickens nesting on our disappointed hopes.”

— Deanna Raybourn

133. “Was Beatrice capable of such machinations? I could not say. Our acquaintance was of a brief duration, but she was American and, in my experience, Americans are capable of anything.”

— Deanna Raybourn

134. “I like you a little more than I want to but not nearly as much as you think I do.”

— Deanna Raybourn

135. “Forty years on one of the most elite assassin squads on earth and it finished like this, with a free cruise and a bouncy letter from a girl who signed her letters with hashtags.”

— Deanna Raybourn

136. “I loved you when the world was new. I love you now. And I will love you until the Earth is burnt away and the stars themselves turn to dust. For we are two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”

— Deanna Raybourn

137. “Children know nothing beyond the upbringing they have. It is only adults who regret what they lacked.”

— Deanna Raybourn

138. “Why must you argue before I even have my tea? So many words.”

— Deanna Raybourn

139. “I know very little, but I am curious about a good deal.”

— Deanna Raybourn

140. “We are, as a gender, undereducated and infantilized to the point of idiocy. But those of us who have been given the benefit of learning and useful occupation, well, we are proof that the traditional notions of feminine delicacy and helplessness are the purest poppycock.”

— Deanna Raybourn

141. “Trouble has smelled like a lot of things in my life. A job gone wrong. A one-way street I never should have turned down. A man in faded Levi’s with a smile that broke my heart half a dozen times and loved it back together again.”

— Deanna Raybourn

142. “If I could have created a perfect woman, I could never have imagined you. But that is my failure. Not yours.”

— Deanna Raybourn

143. “What do you think my chances are there?” she asked. “Maybe he has a geriatric kink,” I said, shaking out my napkin. “Dab a little Metamucil behind each ear and go get him, cougar.” “No, no,” Mary Alice corrected. “She’s too old to be a cougar. She’s a saber-tooth tiger.”

— Deanna Raybourn

144. “Gravity comes for us all in the end.”

— Deanna Raybourn

145. “I rolled my eyes. “You have all the subtlety of a melodrama heroine,” I informed him. “And the endurance of a particularly tiny sea slug. Where is your spirit, sir? Where is your grit?” “In my other trousers,” he said, his jaws clenched.”

— Deanna Raybourn

146. “It was astonishing, I mused, how often people claimed to be honest when they were simply making a virtue of excessive rudeness.”

— Deanna Raybourn

147. “He was dressed like a tourist, his T-shirt tucked into belted jeans like a sociopath.”

— Deanna Raybourn

148. “That’s the thing about being a sixty-year-old woman – no one notices you unless you want them to. That fact doesn’t do your ego any favors, but in cases like this, it was damned handy.”

— Deanna Raybourn

149. “He nodded. “Of course, the male is so dominant and attractive.” “That is not the male,” I corrected. “The male eclectus is green, the color of his surroundings, meant to blend in and go unnoticed. It is the female which boasts the glorious scarlet plumage. You, my dear general, have made the very common mistake of believing, as so many others do, that the male of the species is the default.”

— Deanna Raybourn

150. “I have seen enough of the world to know that women can scratch and claw and fight just as fiercely as men for what they want. Perhaps more.”

— Deanna Raybourn