Top 120 Stuart Turton Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

53. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

56. “Beautiful heiresses commit suicide at balls.”

— Stuart Turton

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Wealth was a key and poverty was a prison, and they’d been born shackled through no fault of their own.”

— Stuart Turton

60. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

63. “Not all hells are created equal.”

— Stuart Turton

64. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “I forget everything between footsteps.”

— Stuart Turton

76. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

78. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

80. “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

81. “One by one I knit these new memories together until I’ve got five minutes of past to wrap myself in.”

— Stuart Turton

82. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

84. “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

85. “I find the room smothered in sleepy conversation. Most of the guests are only halfway out of their beds, and they reek of the prior evening, sweat and cigar smoke baked into their skin, spirits curled around every breath. They’re talking quietly and moving slowly, porcelain people riddled with cracks.”

— Stuart Turton

86. “Call it a healthy skepticism of any wisdom delivered through a mask.”

— Stuart Turton

87. “Cleverness is a type of strength, and they won’t accept a woman who’s stronger than they are. Their pride won’t allow it, and their pride is the thing they hold dearest.”

— Stuart Turton

88. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

90. “The children I knew have shed their skins and slithered into society.”

— Stuart Turton

91. “It hadn’t made any difference. The dowry was too large. Unbeknown to her, she’d been bred for sale and fattened like a calf with manners and education. She’d felt betrayed, but she’d been young. She understood the world better now. Meat didn’t get a say on whose hook it hung from.”

— Stuart Turton

92. “God no, terrible things, hospitals,” he says, aghast. “Sickness and death swept into corners, diseases curled up in the beds with the patients.”

— Stuart Turton

93. “Age is coiling around me, its fangs in my neck, drawing my strength when I need it most.”

— Stuart Turton

94. “His next words are offerings, carefully chosen and even more carefully placed before me.”

— Stuart Turton

95. “He’s as stooping and sly as I remember, his gaze running its hands through my pockets before taking in my face.”

— Stuart Turton

96. “Fear was too brittle a material to make good decisions from.”

— Stuart Turton

97. “Daniel?” I ask, just about holding onto the back of the conversation as it streaks away from me.”

— Stuart Turton

98. “It almost bought Lia and I an entirely new life.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

100. “His proposal had been thorough, listing the benefits of their union to her father. In short, she’d have a beautiful cage and all the time in the world to admire herself in the bars.”

— Stuart Turton