Top 120 Adrienne Young Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “What he was saying-the things he told me-was his way of showing me he trusted me. It was also his way of giving me the match. If I wanted to, I could burn him down. But if we were going to do this, I would have to be his safe harbor and he would have to be mine.”

— Adrienne Young

52. “I stood against the wind, watching the movement of the water around the coral islands. It pushed up the shelf gently, and if it was as calm beneath the surface as it was above, I could do the dive in just minutes.”

— Adrienne Young

53. “And I think I’ve loved you since the first time we anchored in Jeval.”

— Adrienne Young

54. “And no matter where I went, I’d never get home. Because home was a ship that was at the bottom of the sea, where my mother’s bones lay sleeping.”

— Adrienne Young

55. “There was no way to undo it. No amount of coin or power could turn time back to that night in Tempest Snare, or the day Isolde showed up, asking for a place on Saint’s crew. It was one long series of tragically beautiful knots that bound us together.”

— Adrienne Young

56. “You’ve made me a bringer of death, Jorrund. And there’s no offering of reparation for a crime like that. – Tova.”

— Adrienne Young

57. “After a lifetime of hungering for things to change, I’d settled into a life that I hoped never would.”

— Adrienne Young

58. “There were some things that were a part of you, no matter how badly they hurt.”

— Adrienne Young

59. “Isolde was the wind and sea and sky of Saint’s world. She was the pattern of stars that he navigated by, the sum of all directions on his compass. And he was lost without her.”

— Adrienne Young

60. “I’d envied Iri my whole life for his open heart, and now mine had been pried open too.”

— Adrienne Young

61. “My mother looked at me then, with something in her eyes I’d never seen before. A reverence. As if something marvelous and at the same time harrowing had just happened. She blinked, pulling me between her and Saint, and I burrowed in, their warmth instantly making me feel like a child again.”

— Adrienne Young

62. “It was terrifying- that feeling- like there was something tying me to him. Because if one of us fell into the darkness, the other would too.”

— Adrienne Young

63. “This time, I left Saint behind.”

— Adrienne Young

64. “So she’d never asked and I’d never told her, and in the end, it broke us anyway.”

— Adrienne Young

65. “Nothing is free. He wasn’t just talking about food or passage or the clothes on your back. He was talking about respect. Safety. Protection. They were things no one owed you. And one way or another, you always paid.”

— Adrienne Young

66. “He looked at me with a hundred stories lit behind his eyes.”

— Adrienne Young

67. “It caught the wind above me as I untied the lines and pulled. The night sky was black and empty, stars cast across it in swirling sprays. There was no moon, leaving the deck of the ship dark below. I leaned into the mast, letting my weight fall into the ropes, and tipped my head back, feeling the wind rush around me.”

— Adrienne Young

68. “I know you don’t know how to love me. I know you’re not built for it.”

— Adrienne Young

69. “If we’re going to fight, we have to know that we are still who we are. If we’re going to die, we have to know that we’re dying for something.”

— Adrienne Young

70. “It wasn’t the kind of kiss that lovers shared, but there were a hundred secrets in the way that they looked at each other.”

— Adrienne Young

71. “It was also his way of giving me the match. If I wanted to, I could burn him down. But if we were going to do this, I would have to be his safe harbor and he would have to be mine.”

— Adrienne Young

72. “The writhing, bleeding hole inside of me closed up. I let him erase it. I let him make it go away.”

— Adrienne Young

73. “I didn’t belong on the land or on the docks or the cities that lay across the Narrows, The place I belonged was gone.”

— Adrienne Young

74. “It was the end. And at the end, life becomes precious.”

— Adrienne Young

75. “We’d had no beginning, I realized. We just always were. When I thought about it like that, it was comforting. Like there was no waiting for an end, either.”

— Adrienne Young

76. “I pulled her hand toward me to secure the straps of her shield onto her arm by memory. We’d been fighting mates for the last five years and I knew every piece of her armor as well as she knew every badly mended bone in my body.”

— Adrienne Young

77. “Nothing is free, they were things no one owed you. They were rules, keep the secret.”

— Adrienne Young

78. “Every autumn, when the crowds filled Main Street, I would watch out the window of my mother’s shop and imagine him appearing in the stream of faces. More than once, I even thought I saw him. It took longer than I wanted to admit for me to realize that I couldn’t cut him from me. That some part of him had been fused to places I couldn’t even see.”

— Adrienne Young

79. “I left you there because I have never loved anything in my life like I love you. Not Isolde. Not the trade. Nothing.”

— Adrienne Young

80. “When he was gone, I reached into my pocket and pulled my idol of Iri free. The wood was smooth and shining where I’d held it in prayer under every moon that rose in the sky. I carried it against my heart as I fought. I slept with it beside me. We became warriors together. And long before that, we were friends.”

— Adrienne Young

81. “Like everything I’d ever been taught didn’t fit into the shape of this world.”

— Adrienne Young

82. “I may not have known how to find him, but he’d known where I was. He’d always known. August wasn’t lost. He wasn’t taken away or waiting for me somewhere. He never came back. He had never come back for me.”

— Adrienne Young

83. “I loved her long before that. I don’t really remember a time that I didn’t love her.”

— Adrienne Young

84. “We find things, just as we lose things. If you’ve lost your honor, you’ll find it again.”

— Adrienne Young

85. “It was one long series of tragically beautiful knots that bound us together.”

— Adrienne Young

86. “I sat down on the cot, curling up on my side and tried to stay quiet as I wept. But the thing writhing inside me was too angry to be calmed. It was too hurt to be hushed. It was a living, breathing thing and it was trying to swallow me whole. And maybe it would. I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore and only the sound of the fire remained.”

— Adrienne Young

87. “My father’s rasping whistle caught my ears from down the line and I searched the dirt-smeared faces until I found a pair of bright blue eyes fixed on me. His gray-streaked beard hung braided down his chest behind the axe clutched in his huge fist. He tipped his chin up at me and I whistled back – our way of telling each other to be careful. To try not to die.”

— Adrienne Young

88. “I’d always wanted to hear him say he loved me. I’d wanted to hear the words so many times. But in that moment, I was suddenly frightened he would. I was terrified to know how badly they would hurt me.”

— Adrienne Young

89. “There was an ocean of lies dragging behind this ship. They’d killed their dredger and another helmsman’s stryker. Whatever they’d done in Sowan was spreading in rumors across the Narrows. And if that wasn’t enough they were running side trade under the nose or their own employer.”

— Adrienne Young

90. “Because that kiss broke open some dark night sky within me filled with stars and moons and flaming comets. That darkness was replaced by the blazing fire of the sun racing under my skin. Because the most deeply buried truth, hidden beneath everything my father taught me, was that I had wanted to touch West a thousand times.”

— Adrienne Young

91. “The Lark. the place my mother’s story ended. Any in many ways, the place where mine began.”

— Adrienne Young

92. “There were tales that only the island knew. Ones that had never been told. I knew, because I was one of them.”

— Adrienne Young

93. “It was an easy silence. A comfortable one. All the questions I ever wanted to ask him swirled in my head, spinning so fast that I could hardly untangle them from one another. But they never found their way to my tongue. Suddenly, it seemed, I didn’t need to ask them. Suddenly, none of it mattered.”

— Adrienne Young

94. “While the outside world was burning their witches, we were here. On the island.”

— Adrienne Young

95. “You can’t change your blood Eelyn! You can’t just erase all the Aska the Riki have killed!” Her voice was raw and I knew she was thinking about her sister.”

— Adrienne Young

96. “I hadn’t just left my mother in the Unnamed Sea. I’d left my home. The place I’d taken my first breaths. But I could feel in my bones that these unknown waters were the place I’d take my last.”

— Adrienne Young

97. “Because I’m somehow still connected to you. Like a part of me isn’t there if you’re not there. For years, I thought that would go away. It didn’t.”

— Adrienne Young

98. “What I want is not to die alone,” she said, her voice suddenly small. “I didn’t really choose this life. It’s just the only one I have...”

— Adrienne Young

99. “My father had always told me that seabirds were the souls of lost traders. To turn them away or not give them a place to land or nest was bad luck.”

— Adrienne Young

100. “I’ve lived enough years now to know that there were some ghosts that haunted you forever. Saoirse had secrets, yes. But so did we.”

— Adrienne Young