A Delicate Deception Quotes

“He didn’t have the imagination to orchestrate illicit liaisons, nor the cunning to do anything sly. He had all the subtlety of a puppy, all the capacity for guile of a newborn baby.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Imagine Sir Walter Scott, but if every woman in English history dabbled in witchcraft or murder.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“The rules as we know them might work wonderfully for most people, but they’re absolute rubbish for anyone who’s a little different.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“She’s not a peaceable woman, my mother. She wrote that book because she didn’t think the world needed another generation of peaceable women, or complacent adults of any gender. I do wish she could see Leontine.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“This isn’t a book about deportment. It’ll have any child deporting themselves right out of polite society,” he said. “And right into prison, if my mother’s any example.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Perhaps Mr. Goddard does not understand that people can amuse themselves by hurling polite insults at one another and accusing one another of sloppy research and utter illogic.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“She knew she shouldn’t have said anything. But here she was, sated and happy and warm and she stupidly felt like she could be honest with this man. “Don’t be like that,” she said. “Don’t mystify my hymen.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“The next time we decide to defame a historical figure, let’s pick somebody more interesting.” “There’s no challenge in that,” Amelia argued.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Perhaps the wisest course of action would have been simply not to engage with lunatic historians, but that would have required a degree of restraint that Amelia had never possessed.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“We’re never going to bed together and we’ll be raiding an orphanage at the earliest opportunity. Wish me happy.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“What I mean is that if we try to mend this”—oh, God help him, he was about to launch into an extended engineering metaphor—“we need to make sure it’s, um, structurally sound. Better than before. No gaps in knowledge or intent.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“My mother never met a fight she didn’t want to hurl herself bodily into. I miss her.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“because there are many children who have neither shoes nor pretty things, and it made a mockery of their suffering to force Rosie to go shoeless as well.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“This isn’t a book about deportment. It’ll have any child deporting themselves right out of polite society,”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“It might very well be a sound idea: Amelia had been both ashamed and extremely well-behaved. But she also had lost years of her life to that shame.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Maybe you can’t,” Lex said. “The rest of us can. Hedgehogs and French urchins and dukes don’t have jobs waiting for them in Birmingham.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“So get off your high horse, Sydney. We’re all fallen, and all we have is one another. So kindly bugger off. Carter!”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“And he had missed Andrew, of course he had, but he saw now that he had been missing something else—joy, maybe. Something sweet and sharp that he felt when he saw Leontine tinkering with a clock, or when Lex ribbed him, or when—every minute he spent with Amelia, but he wouldn’t let himself think about that.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Quite excessive of you,” Lex went on, ignoring him. He was enjoying this far too much. “One may be assaulted by at most a third of the redheaded girls one meets. Anything more speaks of a character flaw.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“I don’t want to talk about dukes.” His voice was low, almost a growl. “Bollocks on every last one of them.” “Are you a radical? What a relief. One doesn’t like to ask, but what if I had kissed a Tory?”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“He suspected that this was more serious for him than it was for her, because in his experience everything was always more serious for him than it was for everyone else around him.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“She’d urge you to forsake Mammon and cast your sights heavenward,” he lied. What she would actually do was attempt to persuade Lex to sign some kind of petition about mill workers, then leave with a hefty subscription to one of her favorite charities.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Otherwise, when speaking with a person with whom he wasn’t intimate enough to use a first name, he used their full name. Or, as in this case, he could presume a little and skip right to using given names.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Like most Friends his age, Sydney adopted a fairly flexible approach: he used titles when he had to, usually with shareholders in the railway who needed to be cosseted and cajoled, and he hated it every time.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Georgiana had come to Derbyshire to tempt men into wickedness by performing such risqué acts as existing while being pretty.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“There would always be a part of Sydney that saw a structurally unsound pile of stones and greeted it as a welcome challenge.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“What kind of engines?” she asked. Across her face flitted the same expression Andrew used to have when sneaking a lemon drop out of their father’s pocket. It was a look of barely concealed longing. It was, to say the least, not the expression that usually accompanied polite inquiries about engines.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“Across her face flitted the same expression Andrew used to have when sneaking a lemon drop out of their father’s pocket. It was a look of barely concealed longing. It was, to say the least, not the expression that usually accompanied polite inquiries about engines.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“This was Susannah at her bath, but instead of seeing her in a state of undress, he had a sense of seeing her without armor.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception

“He badly wanted to return to the railway, where he could turn his attention to the future and rid himself of the moldering past. There, he could keep his mind busy and free of old ghosts.”
― Cat Sebastian, A Delicate Deception