Top 80 Carol Rifka Brunt Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

2. “Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have. Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. Waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

3. “Once you know a thing you can’t ever unknow it.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

4. “There’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on. It makes you believe you’re special.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

Featured in: Winter Quotes

5. “Going into the woods alone is the best way to pretend you’re in another time. It’s a thing you can only do alone. If there’s somebody else with you, it’s too easy to remember where you really are.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

6. “Finn said art isn’t about drawing or painting a perfect bowl of fruit. It’s about ideas. And you, he said, have enough good ideas to last a lifetime.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

7. “I thought it was good to test yourself sometimes. It was good to see how much you could take.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

8. “Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

9. “Nothing had changed. I was the stupid one again. I was the girl who never understood who she was to people.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

10. “The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

11. “I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

12. “Because maybe I don’t want to leave the planet invisible. Maybe I need at least one person to remember something about me.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

13. “That’s the secret. If you always make sure you’re exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won’t care if you die tomorrow.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

14. “You think I don’t know about wrong love, June? You think I don’t understand embarrassing love?”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

15. “I knew the way lost hopes could be dangerous, how they could turn a person into someone they never thought they’d be.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

16. “I was in a place where nobody knew my heart even a little bit.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

17. “My mother gave me a disappointed look. Then I gave her one back. Mine was for everything, not just the sandwich.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

18. “I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

19. “You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

20. “If my life was a film, I’d have walked out by now.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

21. “I know all about love that’s too big to stay in a tiny bucket. Splashing out all over the place in the most embarrassing way possible.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

22. “If things went my way, I would be working at a renaissance fair as a falconer. I wouldn’t have to worry about climbing career ladders or getting promotions, because falconry’s not like that. Either you’re a falconer or you’re not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away. My father waited.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

23. “Yeah, okay. I’ll drop it,” I said, and although I held it back with every muscle in my body, what I really wanted to do was cry. Not only because Finn had never told me about this guy, but because there was no way to ask him about it. And until then I don’t think I really understood the meaning of gone.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

24. “I stared hard, trying to find a pattern. Thinking if I kept looking hard enough, maybe the pieces of the world would fit back together into something I could understand.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

25. “There are dark black buttons tattooed on my heart. I’ll carry them for the rest of my days.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

26. “I used to think maybe I wanted to become a falconer, and now I’m sure of it, because I need to figure out the secret. I need to work out how to keep things flying back to me instead of always flying away.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

27. “I go to the movies whenever I get the chance, because the movie theater is like the woods. It’s another place that’s like a time machine.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

28. “Maybe all I wanted was for Toby to hear the wolves that lived in the dark forest of my heart.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

29. “The kinds of things I want don’t cost money.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

30. “Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

31. “After a snowstorm is the best time to be in the woods, because all the empty beer and soda cans and candy wrappers disappear, and you don’t have to try as hard to be in another time. Plus there’s just something beautiful about walking on snow that nobody else has walked on.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

32. “You get into habits. Ways of being with certain people.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

33. “Hm-hm-hm,” his laugh went. Like he’d swallowed the sun.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

34. “I only need one good friend to see me through. Most people aren’t like that. Most people are always looking out for more people to know.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

35. “There was something so lonely about that moment, everyone around me completely involved in this thing I wasn’t a part of, me with nowhere to go.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

36. “Either you’re a falconer or you’re not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

37. “None of those things should have mattered, but I guess they did. I guess they were like water. Soft and harmless until enough time went by. Then all of a sudden you found yourself with the Grand Canyon on your hands.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

38. “I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother’s head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

39. “I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

40. “Then we left, just me running with my sister, the wolves at our backs.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

41. “That’s when I broke down and cried, because I already knew the very best people. Finn was the very best person I knew.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

42. “You could just hold them, couldn’t you? You could sit close to them, nestle into them so you could hear the machine of them churning away. You could press your ear against that person’s back, listening to the rhythm of them, knowing that you were both made of the same exact stuff. You could do things like that.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

43. “Heart. Hard Heart,′ I said, not sure where it came from. ‘The hardest heart in the world.’... ‘The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt?”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

44. “Greta always wanted to know everything. Every little detail. But I understood. You can ruin anything if you know too much.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

45. “Being a romantic means you always see what’s beautiful. What’s good. You don’t want to see the gritty truth of things. You believe everything will turn out right.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

46. “That’s one of those snapshot moments. I don’t know why some memories are like that, where everything is perfectly preserved. Frozen.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

47. “Beauty parlor was a game was used to play when we were little, when we were still best friends.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

48. “It’s hard to do that, to decide to believe one thing over another.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

49. “I didn’t know how to seal a promise with a dead person.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt

50. “That’s the difference between you and Greta. She has better things to do. She gets involved in clubs, activities. She has friends. But you? You slump around in that room of yours –.”

— Carol Rifka Brunt