Top 120 Adrienne Young Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “I’d seen enough strange things at sea to believe it. The Riven had lost her soul a long time ago. So had we.”

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

54. “If it hadn’t been my prison, I might even think it was beautiful.”

— Adrienne Young

55. “Keep your knife where you can reach it. Never, ever owe anyone anything. Nothing is free. Always construct a lie from a truth. Never, under any circumstances, reveal what or who matters to you.”

— Adrienne Young

56. “And when he kissed me again, the seconds slowed. They stretched out and made more time. I felt his body against mine, unraveling everything else that was between us, and my soul unwound, threading itself to his. And I let it. I gave myself to him. Because I was already his.”

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

58. “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

59. “My mother called it touching the soul of the storm. When she came upon us like that, she was taking us into her heart and letting us see her. She was saying something. And only then would we know what lay within her. Only then would we know who she was.”

— Adrienne Young

60. “This time, I left Saint behind.”

— Adrienne Young

61. “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

62. “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

63. “My heart was that strange, shooting star. Always falling.”

— Adrienne Young

64. “Tempest Snare was where it began. It was fitting that it would end there too.”

— Adrienne Young

65. “She’s got fire in her blood.”

— Adrienne Young

66. “I wasn’t afraid anymore. The thing I felt in the center of my gut when I was with him was the only thing that had ever felt real. More real than Henrik’s letter. More real than the agreement he’d made with Sariah. More real than the tea house or the match with Coen. This belonged to me. It was the only thing that belonged to me.”

— Adrienne Young

67. “I looked up into Myra’s face, twisted with madness. It was the look she gave our enemy in battle, and now it fell on me.”

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

69. “Waterside strays.”

— Adrienne Young

70. “Even if you can’t see her when you close your eyes, our bodies and our minds remember things that we can’t. They hold onto things.”

— Adrienne Young

71. “It was tradition for every member of a crew to give a copper to the newest member as a show of good faith. I’d seen my father’s crews do the same many times. But in the years since I first set foot on Jeval, I’d never been given anything. Ever. I didn’t bother trying to hold back my tears. They streamed down my face one after the other as I hugged the hat to me. Like a weary bird flying out over the most desolate sea, I finally had a place to land.”

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

73. “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

74. “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

75. “I dropped my eyes, the sudden flush in my cheeks warming my skin.”

— Adrienne Young

76. “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

77. “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

78. “I underestimated my ability to be on this ship with you and not touch you.”

— Adrienne Young

79. “I’d been eighteen years old. I’d known nothing about suffering or responsibility or loss, but somehow, I’d known this soul-deep king of love that I now wondered if most people never found. It cut open a vein in me that never stopped flowing.”

— Adrienne Young

80. “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

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

— Adrienne Young

82. “It was a world poised on the top of a knife.”

— Adrienne Young

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

87. “The first time I’d seen his darkness and every time he’d seen mine. We were salt and sand and sea and storm.”

— Adrienne Young

88. “If I had anyone skilled enough to make it, I wouldn’t have commissioned you, Ezra.”

— Adrienne Young

89. “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

90. “The Spinners were wise, but they weren’t always kind. Sometimes fate was a tangled knot. Sometimes it was a noose. Or a net. But sometimes, it was the rope that pulled you from the sinking deep.”

— Adrienne Young

91. “I wasn’t sure anymore which were memories and which were dreams. I’d lost track of that a long time ago.”

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

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

— Adrienne Young

94. “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

95. “I could still see a young Eelyn standing on the beach turned into the wind, a sword in one hand and an axe in the other. I hadn’t lost her. I hadn’t buried her. I’d only let her change into something new.”

— Adrienne Young

96. “Now I was the girl who’d found her own way. And I also had something to lose.”

— Adrienne Young

97. “My life had been decided by a deal. So had Ezra’s. But I was finished letting other people decide for me. The power of Henrik Roth was no more than lifting smoke. He was the sum of beliefs and myths and tales told. I was ready to tell my own stories.”

— Adrienne Young

98. “Home felt an entire world away.”

— Adrienne Young

99. “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

100. “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