Top 50 Lyndsay Faye Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “But I will be a beautiful disaster.”

— Lyndsay Faye

2. “I am pleased beyond words you aren’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”

— Lyndsay Faye

3. “There was Fiona Fiddick’s faculties for both humour and sewing, which enabled her to hide the words FEED ME in an embroidered nosegay of coral peonies which Miss Sheffleton proudly hung upon the classroom wall.”

— Lyndsay Faye

4. “God, it’s like teaching a snake to play tennis.”

— Lyndsay Faye

5. “People tell me things they shouldn’t. Things they ought to be powdering over, shoveling underground, facts they ought to be stuffing into a carpetbag before dropping into the river and quietly drowning.”

— Lyndsay Faye

6. “We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell the truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.”

— Lyndsay Faye

7. “Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened.”

— Lyndsay Faye

8. “And that was when I realized that she was actually a very good liar. Only good liars are surprised at being caught.”

— Lyndsay Faye

9. “Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons.”

— Lyndsay Faye

10. “A word of advice: Do not ever kill for love, or you will find yourself tethered, staked to the ground when your cleanest instincts require you to run for your life without a backwards glance. Killing for love is one of the most tangled acts you can commit, reader, in an already twisted world.”

— Lyndsay Faye

11. “If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster. But I will be a beautiful disaster.”

— Lyndsay Faye

12. “And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.”

— Lyndsay Faye

13. “By day I taught Sahjara, who brought me unceasing small presents ranging from orange flower cakes to bouquets of jolly red berries; by night, I imagined my employer making the sort of inappropriate advances which would have made most governesses flee the estate forthwith, and in graphic detail, complete with bare thighs and calloused fingers and the diagonal notches which rest so sweetly above the hipbones when a gentleman is in training, as I had no doubt whatsoever Mr. Thornfield was.”

— Lyndsay Faye

14. “Besides, Watson,” he added, with a glint of humour in his grey eyes, “you, after all, are a man of the world. We must put your skills to use, for there is no greater tragedy on God’s green earth than that of untapped talent.”

— Lyndsay Faye

15. “We must put your skills to use, for there is no greater tragedy on God’s green earth than that of untapped talent.”

— Lyndsay Faye

16. “Tim, press your teeth together and keep them that way,′ he growled.”

— Lyndsay Faye

17. “Elections decide which horde of rats gets to gnaw at the bones.”

— Lyndsay Faye

18. “Until something has been taken from you, it is difficult to gauge what sort of holes will be left by its absence.”

— Lyndsay Faye

19. “I have given up attempting to plumb the depths of the female psyche, Watson. It is not unlike contemplating infinity – a worthy, even a spiritual meditation, destined from the beginning to fail entirely.”

— Lyndsay Faye

20. “You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years – to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you – and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well.”

— Lyndsay Faye

21. “That accidents happen is a universal principle – and perhaps the only universal principle worth mentioning, for it governs an enormous percentage of our daily lives.”

— Lyndsay Faye

22. “I always knew my grip upon the thread of time was tenuous, and the harder I clutched, the sooner it would break. Therefore, do not weep for me, my tender sweet love – we must all resign ourselves to the final snapping of that bond between soul and death, and though it is a present unworthy of your grace and beauty, you must know that I gift my soul to you.”

— Lyndsay Faye

23. “Though I no longer presumed to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings.”

— Lyndsay Faye

24. “Fourth, a telegram from brother Mycroft: ‘Will visit at earliest possible convenience – great uproar in Whitehall. Mend quickly; your death would be most inconvenient at this time.”

— Lyndsay Faye

25. “Tell Mrs. Hudson there will be five for supper. If I am not back by eight, I will have no doubt been arrested. In that case, of course, there will be four.”

— Lyndsay Faye

26. “My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all.”

— Lyndsay Faye

27. “Come now, my dear fellow. Expertise is none the less admirable for being of an unsavoury variety.”

— Lyndsay Faye

28. “There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere:.”

— Lyndsay Faye

29. “I relate to this story almost as I would a friend or a lover – at times I want to breathe its entire alphabet into my lungs, and at others I should prefer to throw it across the room.”

— Lyndsay Faye

30. “One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it.”

— Lyndsay Faye

31. “Flattery, I have found, is a great treat for those born innately selfish.”

— Lyndsay Faye

32. “Knowing that home was hateful to us both, I imagined that her calling me by the word meant I was expedient, or sturdy; but if I could only keep her hand in mine, I knew I would give my four limbs and my heart for the privilege, becoming instead four walls and a roof.”

— Lyndsay Faye

33. “Some cities bustle, some meander, I have read; London blazes and it incinerates. London is the wolf’s maw. From the instant I arrived there, I loved every smoldering inch of it.”

— Lyndsay Faye

34. “I looked up in curiosity. Behind us stood the Brown and Eagle Wool Warehouse and Schneider’s Cap Factory, both constructed with that wholehearted devotion to industry that sullied the word architecture.”

— Lyndsay Faye

35. “Being brave and being alone aren’t the same thing.”

— Lyndsay Faye

36. “Confident I remain, however, and I find myself hopeful as well – if the world is wide enough for me to find someone, who knows what miracles lurk behind each and every closed door? Charles Thornefield and I are far from perfect; but we are perfect for each other, and perhaps in the end, our chains bind us more closely than anyone who has never been a prisoner can imagine.”

— Lyndsay Faye

37. “In retrospect, I am very nearly as sharp as I pretend to be.”

— Lyndsay Faye

38. “Knowing even as I craved permanence in New York City, that would never come to pass. The pair of us would live for as long as we could. As well as well could. That was all. Then we’d blow away like wishes made on dandelion heads.”

— Lyndsay Faye

39. “I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories.”

— Lyndsay Faye

40. “Penned creatures suffer, but the more so when they imagine a pen what ain’t there.”

— Lyndsay Faye

41. “Still I caught glimpses of another creature there in the tress, one with round eyes and a predator’s hungry stare; but by the time I understood that I was the prey, my fate had already been sealed.”

— Lyndsay Faye

42. “We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.”

— Lyndsay Faye

43. “I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.”

— Lyndsay Faye

44. “Charles says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am his Jane; Sardar says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am my own Jane; Sahjara says that she does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as she is my Sahjara. Thus I am daily three Janes, and so the luckiest of all.”

— Lyndsay Faye

45. “There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: thin eggshell dawn-soaked curtains stained with materials unknown to science; rattling fit to grind bones to powder; the ripe stench of horse and driver and bog. Now.”

— Lyndsay Faye

46. “Look at it,′ he said, gesturing. ‘This window looks down upon hundreds more panes of glass, and behind those panes live thousands upon thousands of lost souls. When I feel cast down and helpless, scores of other men do as well, and when I am bitterly angry at feeling cast down and helpless, countless other people languish in concert with me. When I’m happy, it’s the same. It’s a bit like... I used to play chamber music. It’s like a vast orchestra. And so I shan’t ever be alone.”

— Lyndsay Faye

47. “I found her at a theater in New Orleans, meowing to raise hell in the orchestra pit. In retrospect, I think she really was attempting to contact her cohorts in Hades. She was only a kitten, and I a lonesome chorus girl far from home. A sap, in other words. I took her to my bosom, and she instantly drew blood. Literally.”

— Lyndsay Faye

48. “We can only see this infinitesimally small slice of time, this instant, and now this instant. Maybe serenity is realizing that the only way to change your circumstances is to live right now. Otherwise you’re either too early, or you’re too late.”

— Lyndsay Faye

49. “He can no longer imagine the warm weight in his palm of an unshattered heart. It was never in his chest, not really. It lived in his hand. It might have been cracked, but he was always offering it to his friend. Every day, in countless fashions. Here. It’s yours for the taking. Do you want it? I don’t know whether you do, but your wanting it would be the greatest gift of my life.”

— Lyndsay Faye

50. “No, no, Watson, it is all wrong. These certainly are my ts, ys, and ms, and the capital A is very good, but what on earth induced you to obey a note with such a manifestly inaccurate q?”

— Lyndsay Faye