Top 120 Stuart Turton Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Are you keeping Sara out of trouble?” “I’m trying, but she seems terribly fond of it.”

— Stuart Turton

103. “Thirty seconds,” I mutter. That’s how long I hesitated when I first spotted her, and that’s how far away I was when she was murdered.”

— Stuart Turton

104. “My mind is a stuffed trunk that needs unpacking.”

— Stuart Turton

105. “His hatred is viscous, it has texture. I could wring it out of the air and bottle it.”

— Stuart Turton

106. “On a normal day, these people would be buying from the bakers, tailors, cordwainers, binders and candlemakers lining the boulevard. They’d be smiling and laughing, grumbling about the infernal heat, but manacle a man and offer him up to torment, and even the meekest soul surrendered itself to the devil.”

— Stuart Turton

107. “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

108. “Mementos of his victories, no different to Vos and I.”

— Stuart Turton

109. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

111. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

115. “She doesn’t take kindly to young men who think too much. She believes it’s a sign of idleness.”

— Stuart Turton

116. “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

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

120. “You know what men are when there’s nobody ordering them to be better.”

— Stuart Turton

121. “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

122. “Pity’s a fog to become lost within.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

125. “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

126. “That’s the beauty of corrupt men, you can always rely on them to be corrupt.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton

128. “Sammy was what Arent hoped the entire world could be. If an old woman was wronged, she should have her recompense, whether she was rich or poor, strong or weak. The weak shouldn’t have to fear the powerful, and the powerful shouldn’t simply be allowed to take what they wanted without consequence. 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

129. “I was promised eight hosts to solve this mystery, and I’ve been given them, except that Bell was a coward, the butler was beaten half to death, Donald Davies fled, Ravencourt could barely move, and Derby can’t hold a thought. It’s like I’ve been asked to dig a hole with a shovel made of sparrows.”

— Stuart Turton

130. “Then it would be foolish for you to go alone, besides I brought some help.’ From her handbag, she pulls out a black revolver.”

— Stuart Turton

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

— Stuart Turton