Top 140 Stuart Turton Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Oh, don’t mind me,” she says. “I loathe getting to know people, so whenever I meet somebody I like, I just assume a friendship immediately. It saves a great deal of time in the long run.”

— Stuart Turton

52. “Don’t you understand yet?” I say. “I don’t care about your rules, because I’m not going to play.”

— Stuart Turton

53. “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

54. “A rotund fellow in green hunting tweeds has set himself up on the pianoforte in the corrner and is playing a bawdy tune that causes offense only for the ineptness of its delivery. Nobody is paying much attention to him, though he’s doing his best to rectify that.”

— Stuart Turton

55. “I neither hear, nor feel. My grief is a bottomless well. All I can do is fall and hope to hit the bottom.”

— Stuart Turton

56. “Mama says she’d rather be free than wealthy in a cage.’ ‘An argument we frequently enjoy,’ Creesjie snorted. ‘Unlike your mother, I don’t believe women can be free, not while men are stronger. What use is the freedom to be assaulted in the first dark alley we come across? We can’t fight, so we sing, we dance – and we survive. Cornelius Vos adores me, and, if he becomes wealthy, he would make for a fine marriage.”

— Stuart Turton

57. “Your frustration is understandable, but what use is rearranging the furniture if you burn the house down doing it?”

— Stuart Turton

58. “Strong is strong and weak is weak, and it doesn’t matter if you wear breeches or skirts if you’re the latter. Life will hammer you flat.”

— Stuart Turton

59. “Whatever darkness lurks inside Jonathan Derby, Millicent tucked it in at night.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

62. “Oh, you truly are your mother’s daughter,’ said Creesjie, watching her affectionately. ‘Love can be feigned, dear heart. You can even convince yourself of it, if you try hard enough, but it’s impossible to spend an imaginary fortune. Marriage is an inconvenient convenience. It’s the shackle we accept for our safety.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

64. “Not all hells are created equal.”

— Stuart Turton

65. “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

66. “I’m saying you should be careful which knots you unpick,” he says.”

— Stuart Turton

67. “Poverty is the most dangerous thing for a woman. We’re not well suited to a life on the streets.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

69. “Beautiful heiresses commit suicide at balls.”

— Stuart Turton

70. “I watch him squirm for a second or two, balancing the veracity of his story against the pain on his face. Content that the two are of equal weight, I lift my cane, allowing him to stumble away, clutching his aching hand.”

— Stuart Turton

71. “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

72. “Some songs weren’t mere songs. They were memories curled tight and set alight. They made you heartsick.”

— Stuart Turton

73. “I meet his gaze, my host’s too. Dance is slipping apologies onto my tongue, urging me to flee the room. It’s a bloody nuisance. Every time I open my mouth to speak, I have to force aside another man’s embarrassment first.”

— Stuart Turton

74. “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

75. “I can sense my memories just out of reach. They have weight and shape, like shrouded furniture in a darkened room. I’ve simply misplaced the light to see them by.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

77. “Despite my best efforts, everything’s happening exactly as I remember it.”

— Stuart Turton

78. “Deference was something she was supposed to put on every morning, along with her cap and bodice.”

— Stuart Turton

79. “And yet, simply winning isn’t enough. He needs me to know it. He needs me to be afraid. For some reason, he needs me to suffer.”

— Stuart Turton

80. “What’s bleach?’ asks Clara. ‘No idea,’ replies Emory, passing her the chart. ‘It was probably delicious, though.”

— Stuart Turton

81. “The entries were written in English – a clumsy language stitched together fro too many disparate parts to be elegant.”

— Stuart Turton

82. “All that was of value has been taken.”

— Stuart Turton

83. “Until now, the horrors in my future had always been vague, insubstantial things, dark shapes lurking in a fog. But this is me, my fate.”

— Stuart Turton

84. “Ghosts are God’s problem. The living must deal with me,′ declared Sammy.”

— Stuart Turton

85. “You strike me as a man who’d much rather be somewhere else, a feeling I can wholeheartedly sympathize with.”

— Stuart Turton

86. “How long have you been with Pipps?” “Five years,” said Arent, taking another gulp of the terrible wine. “He heard the songs about me and decided he needed somebody like that standing in front of him when he accused people of murder.” Drecht laughed. “You never put that in your stories.” “Good sense sometimes sounds like cowardice when you write it down.” He shrugged his massive shoulders.”

— Stuart Turton

87. “Murder in the morning and costumes at night, cryptic notes and burned butlers; whatever’s happening here, I will not be yanked around like some puppet on a string. I must escape this house.”

— Stuart Turton

88. “The last time I entered this forest, my mind never made it back.”

— Stuart Turton

89. “My attempts to paddle away from the disaster may only hurry us toward it.”

— Stuart Turton

90. “She can’t imagine how hard that was for her; to be full of doubt in a world of conviction.”

— Stuart Turton

91. “For the beautifully attired Crauwels, there could be no greater act of self-harm than dressing like a peasant.”

— Stuart Turton

92. “Uncertainty is a crack through the center of him, undermining any suggestion of solidity or strength. This man’s been broken in two and put back together crooked, and if I had to guess, I’d say there was a child-shaped hole right in the middle.”

— Stuart Turton

93. “Stanwin breathes through his nose, staring at Daniel out of narrowed eyes. It shouldn’t be a contest. Stanwin is squat and solid and spitting venom. Yet there’s something in the way Daniel stands there, hands in his pockets, head tilted, that gives Stanwin pause. Perhaps he’s wary of being hit by the train Daniel appears to be waiting for.”

— Stuart Turton

94. “Lies only come two ways. Too sharp or too soft.”

— Stuart Turton

95. “I’m any face in a crowd; just the Lord’s way of filling in the gaps.”

— Stuart Turton

96. “Evelyn was right, the truth isn’t always a kindness, but no man should discover himself this way, like an abandoned house stumbled upon in the darkness.”

— Stuart Turton

97. “Tempting people with fripperies: sugar, tobacco, alcohol; things that distracted them, that disappeared too quickly, that always needed replacing, things to go mad chasing. In the United East India Company, he saw the devil’s hands at work, caging humanity with want, persuading them to buy their manacles new every month.”

— Stuart Turton

98. “She never learned how to read people, how to pick up the corner of a sentence and peer underneath.”

— Stuart Turton

99. “This time the past will hold her hand and squeeze. Memory will murder her.”

— Stuart Turton

100. “Mercy, he believed, was the gravest wound you could inflict, for it was the only one that wouldn’t heal.”

— Stuart Turton