Top 60 Stephanie Dray Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The curves of his smile become the waves in my ocean.”

— Stephanie Dray

2. “They’ll try to make you forget who you are or try to make you ashamed. But you mustn’t forget and you mustn’t be ashamed.”

— Stephanie Dray

3. “Love is a thing beyond control. Passion is a thing beyond reason. It can’t be denied.”

— Stephanie Dray

4. “Glory is a bittersweet wreath of both flowers and thorns.”

— Stephanie Dray

5. “When and where you are Gaius, I then and there am Gaia.” The words make him smile, and he presses a soft kiss to my cheek. “When and where you are Gaia, I then and there am Gaius.”

— Stephanie Dray

6. “I had come to Rome in chains, but I would leave Rome a queen.”

— Stephanie Dray

7. “Spoken words fail me where my pen rarely does.”

— Stephanie Dray

8. “I’ll tell you a secret about being happy, Tom. Sometimes you just have to pretend at it until it becomes real.”

— Stephanie Dray

9. “But the measure of a man, of a life, of a union of man and wife or even country is not in the falling. It’s in the rising back up again to repair what’s broken, to put right what’s wrong. Your father and I did that. We always did that. He never stopped trying until the day he died. And neither will I.”

— Stephanie Dray

10. “A marriage is like a union of states, requiring countless dinner table bargains to hold it together. There may be irreconcilable differences brewing below the surface that can come to open rupture. And there is, in a marriage, as in a nation, a certain amount of storytelling we do to make it understood. Even if those stories we tell to make our marriage, or country, work don’t paint the whole picture, they’re still true. But to leave Alexander Hamilton out of the painting entirely is a lie.”

— Stephanie Dray

11. “Silence is often the only weapon available to ladies. And I wield mine expertly.”

— Stephanie Dray

12. “Life is a bargain between bitter and sweet. Because there is a surfeit of bitter, we must savor the rare sweet.”

— Stephanie Dray

13. “Patsy, suffering strengthens our constitutions and builds inner fortifications so that we never fall prey to the same agony twice. We must take upon ourselves a smaller evil to defend against the greater evil. We must take upon ourselves a smaller pain in order to survive.” I.”

— Stephanie Dray

14. “From tattered flags and uniforms to friendships strained to the brink, the women of my country had always been the menders to all the things torn asunder.”

— Stephanie Dray

15. “Because partisanship has made anything fair, which honor and propriety might once have kept quiet.”

— Stephanie Dray

16. “From tattered flags and uniforms to friendships strained to the brink, the women of my country had always been the menders to all the things torn asunder. But now we’d do more than patch with needle and thread. We’d have to weave together a whole tapestry of American life with nothing but our own hands, our own crops, and our own ingenuity. And I would prove myself able to the task. There.”

— Stephanie Dray

17. “It was her habit to copy from the text, words that echoed the sentiments of her heart.”

— Stephanie Dray

18. “The opposite of love, I thought, was not hatred, but indifference, and for my own survival, I’d made my heart indifferent to Alexander Hamilton.”

— Stephanie Dray

19. “Probably so. I’m a sinner with more faults than you imagine, Patsy. But you’re the friend to which my soul is unalterably attached, so I’m prepared to make whatever alterations to my character would be conducive to your happiness. Only tell me this. Are my hopes in vain, or can you be induced to love me?” I.”

— Stephanie Dray

20. “I never was a beauty. It was only that, until a few days ago, Alexander had made me feel like one.”

— Stephanie Dray

21. “When the heart finds its one true desire, any separation and delay is unbearable.”

— Stephanie Dray

22. “Angelica had been right. Love was a thing beyond reason, beyond control. A thing almost predestined. And now that this powerful emotion had finally taken hold of me, I was entirely helpless against it.”

— Stephanie Dray

23. “I thought I was the only one who ever considered that trees might suffer melancholy, and the way their branches drooped under the weight of the ice suddenly made my own limbs heavier in sympathy. “But.”

— Stephanie Dray

24. “Though the natural weakness of her body hinders her from doing what men can perform, she has a mind as valiant and as active for the good of her country as the best of us. – Plutarch.”

— Stephanie Dray

25. “I couldn’t open that well inside me, or I’d never get it closed again.”

— Stephanie Dray

26. “It pains me to be an embarrassment to you, but I don’t know how to remedy my flaws. All I know is that whenever I feel strongly compelled to act, a doubt always arises. And whereas the voice of reason is low and persuasive, passion is loud and imperious.”

— Stephanie Dray

27. “The heart swellings convince me of the folly of those who dare to think that any new ties can weaken the first and best of nature.”

— Stephanie Dray

28. “Am I fated to have the men I’ve loved torment me in my weakest moments?”

— Stephanie Dray

29. “But I meant every word. I’d done my daughters no favors hiding behind feminine virtues, allowing men to do as they pleased with little more than sarcasm and secrecy for protest. Seeing my son half-dead, something changed in me – my willingness to obey, my willingness to accept, to let the men handle it was gone. When.”

— Stephanie Dray

30. “But I think it better, in times like these, for us to acknowledge that marriage is a choice, one made, every day, anew.”

— Stephanie Dray

31. “At first my steps are bent and painful. But the farther I walk, the less I feel the pull. Mindful of the cold muck on my feet, I straighten like the Amazon William always said I was. Like the Amazon I am.”

— Stephanie Dray

32. “But any parent who has lost a child will tell you that grief is a monster less vanquished than held at bay. That, like love, survival is a choice to be made anew every morning, and sometimes one must pretend at being healed just to get through the day.”

— Stephanie Dray

33. “She dreams of a future in which she, too, might be of both service and consequence to her country.” It.”

— Stephanie Dray

34. “I now saw union between man and woman was the same as union among the states – as a series of debates and compromises that might hold it all together for a few more years, or end in a painful separation.”

— Stephanie Dray

35. “No one wanted to serve anymore. Not when, under our new government, any man, whether a gentleman or a scoundrel, could say whatever he pleased and print whatever libels he wished without consequence. And the ignorant populists, spewing tobacco juice as they ranted, took full advantage. As if the notion that all men were created equal somehow meant that one need not aspire to knowledge and ability – all distinctions of class, breeding, or merit discarded, all notions of civility deserted.”

— Stephanie Dray

36. “Besides, the less occupation we have, the less we’re disposed to do.”

— Stephanie Dray

37. “What a high-minded thing revolution had seemed when it started; but now I wondered if, in trying to bring about liberty, we’d instead opened the gates of endless war, bloodshed, and immorality.”

— Stephanie Dray

38. “Why was it that women were expected to restrain our every passion for the sake of propriety, but men couldn’t do it even for the sake of the women they loved?”

— Stephanie Dray

39. “Selene’s life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women’s equality hasn’t always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future.”

— Stephanie Dray

40. “And in the end, I was right about Sally. Her fierce determination that her children should be free overcame all other instincts.”

— Stephanie Dray

41. “We must endure criticism if we’re to honor the spirit of independence.”

— Stephanie Dray

42. “Perhaps democracy would always naturally devolve to a state when only a man like Burr – a greedy libertine without any care for what the world might say about him – would stand for election. For what gentleman could ever.”

— Stephanie Dray

43. “We laughed, thinking it quite a wonderful thing to be envied. In those heady, happy days, we’d not learned yet that envy is a poison to which none are immune...”

— Stephanie Dray

44. “I knew that a man was not only himself but also who he wished to be.”

— Stephanie Dray

45. “Octavia may have shared in common their love for the emperor, or perhaps their dependence upon him, but their unity only ran so deep. They were not friends or companions by choice, but bitter rivals.”

— Stephanie Dray

46. “What’s important is that you can be a wife and mother or you can be a devoted daughter all your life. You can’t be both. Not when Thomas Jefferson is your father. You have to choose, Patsy.” His.”

— Stephanie Dray

47. “Alas, memories are made of more than inscriptions in stone. They’re made, too, of the words we leave behind. And my father left so many.”

— Stephanie Dray

48. “Death, well done, is a gateway from this world into another. It needn’t be the end of anything. – Cleopatra.”

— Stephanie Dray

49. “No one wanted to serve anymore. Not when, under our new government, any man, whether a gentleman or a scoundrel, could say whatever he pleased and print whatever libels he wished without consequence.”

— Stephanie Dray

50. “Because I sensed in him the magic of a poet, a storyteller who can bind you with tales of things that had never been and could never be. And I felt myself so bound. Pulled under. At a loss for breath in his presence, just as I once was in a river, clinging to life.”

— Stephanie Dray