Top 70 Hannah Kent Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I don’t want to be remembered, I want to be here!”

— Hannah Kent

2. “The treachery of a friend is worse than that of a foe.”

— Hannah Kent

3. “Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness.”

— Hannah Kent

4. “I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland.”

— Hannah Kent

5. “To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.”

— Hannah Kent

6. “It’s not fair. People claim to know you through the things you’ve done, and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself.”

— Hannah Kent

7. “I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It’s written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.”

— Hannah Kent

8. “I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing Burial Rites, I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.”

— Hannah Kent

9. “As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.”

— Hannah Kent

10. “When did a smile ever get anyone into trouble?”

— Hannah Kent

11. “Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.”

— Hannah Kent

12. “The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.”

— Hannah Kent

13. “A bubble of fear passes up my spine. It’s the feeling of standing on ice and suddenly hearing it crack under your weight – both thrilling and terrifying together.”

— Hannah Kent

14. “So lonely I make friends with the ravens that prey on lambs.”

— Hannah Kent

15. “If I believed everything everyone had ever told me about my family I’d be a sight more miserable than I am now.”

— Hannah Kent

16. “Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones.”

— Hannah Kent

17. “I’ve been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow.”

— Hannah Kent

18. “I preferred to read than talk with the others.”

— Hannah Kent

19. “In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And theres this strange thing: youre never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it makes it very beautiful as well.”

— Hannah Kent

20. “The cormorant on his rock shows you the wind and, depending on where he is facing to, where it is likely to come from.”

— Hannah Kent

21. “No doves come from ravens’ eggs.”

— Hannah Kent

22. “Nora had always believed herself to be a good woman. A kind woman. But perhaps, she thought, we are good only when life makes it easy for us to be so. Maybe the heart hardens when good fortune is not there to soften it.”

— Hannah Kent

23. “They pick a mouse to tame a cat.”

— Hannah Kent

24. “Sometimes, people never stood a chance in the beginning. Or they might have made a mistake. When people start saying things like she must be a bad mother because of that mistake.”... “It’s not fair. People claim to know you through the things you’ve done and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself.”

— Hannah Kent

25. “Thea, if love were a thing, it would be the sinew of a hand stretched in anticipation of grasping. See, my hands, they reach for you. My heart is a hand reaching.”

— Hannah Kent

26. “I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them.”

— Hannah Kent

27. “Dia telah menderaku dengan nasib sial, dan walaupun aku telah berjuang, aku dihantam dan terus dihantam dengan malapetaka; aku ditikam sampai ke hulu oleh nasib.”

— Hannah Kent

28. “In the cowshed, my head hard against the floor, Natan broke the very yolk of my soul.”

— Hannah Kent

29. “Up in the highlands blizzards howl like the widows of fishermen and the wind blisters the skin off your face. Winter comes like a punch in the dark. The uninhabited places are as cruel as any executioner.”

— Hannah Kent

30. “It’s not fair. People claim to know you through the things you’ve done, and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself. No matter how much you try to live a godly life, if you make a mistake in this valley, it’s never forgotten. No matter if you tried to do what was best. No matter if your innermost self whispers, ‘I am not as you say!’ – how other people think of you determines who you are.”

— Hannah Kent

31. “It’s a lie. Man has created God out of fear of dying.”

— Hannah Kent

32. “Natan Ketilsson fetched his wife from heaven’s gate.”

— Hannah Kent

33. “The moss on the forest floor comforted her bare feet, and she had felt protected by the canopy of leaves, had felt the wind to be a voice that rushed through her hair for no other purpose than to speak to her alone. How well she had known God, then. How unknotted her soul. How easy to be.”

— Hannah Kent

34. “Natan non credeva al peccato. Diceva che sono i difetti del carattere a definire ciascun uomo.”

— Hannah Kent

35. “Hvammur, during the trial, they plucked at my words like birds. Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.”

— Hannah Kent

36. “Ogni natura si ribella alle proprie regole per il fine ultimo della bellezza.”

— Hannah Kent

37. “Some folks are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with skin a little a thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most. Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.”

— Hannah Kent

38. “Blind is a man without a book.”

— Hannah Kent

39. “He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide. Knew me like the smell of smoke, knew what I was, and what I wanted.”

— Hannah Kent

40. “Drink makes you shoot the landlord.′ ‘Worse than that, it makes you miss.”

— Hannah Kent

41. “Born blessed under a marriage. Born into a family that would not be ripped apart by poverty.”

— Hannah Kent

42. “The priest... told me that I would burn if I did not cast my mind back over the sin of my life and pray for forgiveness. As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.”

— Hannah Kent

43. “I so often feel that I am barely here, that to feel weight is to be reminded of my own existence.”

— Hannah Kent

44. “There is nothing in the world I now own; even the heat my body gives out is taken away by the summer breeze.”

— Hannah Kent

45. “How hidden the heart, Nance thought. How frightened we are of being known, and yet how desperately we long for it.”

— Hannah Kent

46. “Thea, in all incarnations, wherever my soul has resided, I have loved you, am loving you, will love you. If the earth one day burns out its charge, you will find me in the ash. if the sea dries, find me in its sand. Fingers forever writing your name in ash, in sand, over and over in a love-patterned wasteland.”

— Hannah Kent

47. “Ahora no poseo nada en el mundo; incluso el calor de mi cuerpo se lo lleva la brisa de verano.”

— Hannah Kent

48. “She is not like me. She knows only the tree of life. She has not seen its twisted roots pawing stones and coffins.”

— Hannah Kent

49. “Three days of fasting, she thought. She already felt lightheaded.”

— Hannah Kent

50. “What woman lives on her own with a goat and a low roof of drying herbs? What woman keeps company with the birds and the creatures that belonged to the dappled places? What woman finds contentment in such a solitary life, has no need of children or the comfort of a man? One who has been chosen to walk the boundaries. One who somehow has an understanding of the mysteries of the world and who sees in the clawing briars God’s own handwriting.”

— Hannah Kent