Top 120 Stuart Turton Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

— Stuart Turton

2. “The Plague Doctor claimed Blackheath was meant to rehabilitate us, but bars can’t build better men and misery can only break what goodness remains. This place pinches out the hope in people, and without that hope, what use is love or compassion or kindness?”

— Stuart Turton

3. “I’m caught between the devil and the deep, blue sea, aren’t I?”

— Stuart Turton

4. “We are never more ourselves than when we think people aren’t watching.”

— Stuart Turton

5. “How lost do you have to be to let the devil lead you home?”

— Stuart Turton

6. “Too little information and you’re blind, too much and you’re blinded.”

— Stuart Turton

7. “Power should be a burden, not a shield. It should be used to everybody’s betterment, not merely for the person who wielded it.”

— Stuart Turton

8. “Questions are swords and answers are shields,” persisted Sammy, still staring at Sara. “I’m begging you, armor yourself.”

— Stuart Turton

9. “It was impossible to set fire to the blight that had ruined your crops, but a blight was easily summoned by a witch, at which point any poor woman would do.”

— Stuart Turton

10. “Reason deserts me, rage pouring into the void. Every betrayal, every pain and sorrow, every regret, every disappointment, every humiliation, every anguish, every hurt... all of them, they’re filling me up.”

— Stuart Turton

11. “She’s soulless, conscienceless. I can barely believe she’s a person.”

— Stuart Turton

12. “I’ve been asked to dig a hole with a shovel made of sparrows.”

— Stuart Turton

13. “How lost do you have to be to let the devil lead you home? This lost, I decide. Precisely this lost.”

— Stuart Turton

14. “So this is how men go to the devil, he thought bitterly. Cap in hand and short of hope, all their prayers gone unanswered.”

— Stuart Turton

15. “The downtrodden yearned for stories to explain their misfortunes, though what they really wanted was somebody to blame for their misery.”

— Stuart Turton

16. “People didn’t matter to the Company. They were commodities like everything else: free to produce and cheap to replace. Only what they dug out of the ground had value.”

— Stuart Turton

17. “What use is rearranging the furniture if you burn the house down doing it?”

— Stuart Turton

18. “The air is heavy, sweet with perfume, stirred only by a scratchy music that soars and glides and stuns itself against the walls.”

— Stuart Turton

19. “You’re as dense as the mountains you were carved out of.”

— Stuart Turton

20. “And you know, amid all this brocade, it doesn’t even have pockets. Not one.” She tugged at the material where the pockets should have been.”

— Stuart Turton

21. “There’s a needle in every exchange, the air prickly and dangerous. Perhaps it’s nerves, or the hollow wisdom of foresight, but Blackheath seems fertile ground for tragedy.”

— Stuart Turton

22. “Wrecks have been raised from the ocean bed with less effort, but I hobble toward the cascade of costumes shrouding my quarry.”

— Stuart Turton

23. “I’m no longer a man, I’m a chorus.”

— Stuart Turton

24. “Anger makes good men stubborn and stubborn men petty.”

— Stuart Turton

25. “Was his offer just another torment, a sliver of hope to go mad chasing?”

— Stuart Turton

26. “My rage can’t make sense of anything but itself.”

— Stuart Turton

27. “Everything seems to be a very great effort for them, as though the pale flush of youth were a burden, their energy exhausting.”

— Stuart Turton

28. “Can’t you see, these masks we wear betray us. They reveal us.”

— Stuart Turton

29. “My brother was murdered nineteen years ago tomorrow, Sebastian. I don’t know why, but my parents have decided to mark the occasion by reopening the house where it happened and inviting back the very same guests who were here that day.”

— Stuart Turton

30. “He’s in awe of you. He said you’re remarkable because you choose to do good, rather than because you’re afraid of what’s waiting if you don’t, like most people.”

— Stuart Turton

31. “To Ada, Right now, you’re two years old, asleep in your cot. You’re very strange and you make us laugh a lot. By the time you read this, you’ll be somebody else entirely. I hope we’re still pals. I hope I’m a good dad. I hope I don’t make too many mistakes and you forgive the ones I do. Truth is, I have no idea what I’m doing. But I’m always trying hard. I love you, kid. This is for you. Whoever you’ve become.”

— Stuart Turton

32. “Anger’s solid, it has weight. You can beat your fists against it. Pity’s a fog to become lost within.”

— Stuart Turton

33. “The world’s shrivelling beyond the windows, darkening at the edges and blackening at the centre.”

— Stuart Turton

34. “Every word out of his mouth felt like it was being etched into history; every glance contained a subtle rebuke, an invitation for others to measure themselves against him and discover the ways in which they were wanting.”

— Stuart Turton

35. “Se Arent Hayes era un demone, si era camuffato talmente bene da essere accidentalmente diventato un brav’uomo.”

— Stuart Turton

36. “Wealth is poisonous to the soul, and my parents have been wealthy a very long time – as have most of the guests who will be at this party. Their manners are a mask; you’d do well to remember that.”

— Stuart Turton

37. “Life doesn’t always leave you a choice in how you live it.”

— Stuart Turton

38. “Seeing me, he grins broadly, the boy in the man appearing as if through a window.”

— Stuart Turton

39. “But there seems no way to change things without making them worse.”

— Stuart Turton

40. “That mark on the sail is how it starts. It’s meant to scare us, because scared people will do anything to stop being scared and they’ll do it to almost anybody else.”

— Stuart Turton

41. “Too tired to hold on, I slip back into the dark.”

— Stuart Turton

42. “We’re trading devils,” says the shaggy lawyer eventually. “Perhaps,” says Hardcastle, “but I’ve read my Dante, Philip. Not all hells are created equal. Now, what do you say?”

— Stuart Turton

43. “Chairs and chaise longues have been gathered around the fire, young women draped over them like wilted orchids, smoking cigarettes and clinging to their drinks.”

— Stuart Turton

44. “I have the sense of having stumbled upon something sleeping, that uncertain light the heartbeat of a creature vast and dangerous and still.”

— Stuart Turton

45. “The Banda Islands are a wretched hovel,’ said her husband contemptuously. ‘What use is wealth if they waste it buying beads from the English? They have no art, they have no culture, no debate. They exist as we must have first existed when God brought us forth from clay.”

— Stuart Turton

46. “A face is a mask of another sort.”

— Stuart Turton

47. “Guilt was like dirt. It got under the skin and didn’t come clean. It made people second guess everything that was done, find fault where there was none and imagine mistakes that weren’t made. Soon enough, worries were worming out of them, growing fat on their doubt. Before long they were on their hands and knees at the crime.”

— Stuart Turton

48. “I grew up with the dirt for a pillow and the wind for a blanket.”

— Stuart Turton

49. “I forget everything between footsteps.”

— Stuart Turton

50. “To even attempt it, liars must believe themselves to be cleverer than the person they’re lying to, an assumption he finds grotesquely insulting.”

— Stuart Turton