Top 35 Kaliane Bradley Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “But the stars aren’t eternal. Most were already dead, and I was looking at ghosts. At some point in our planet’s future, the skyscape will change. There might not be people left by then... These stars were a temporary, beautiful gift of our era – the era that we all shared, a human era. I’d die one day, just like everyone else, so I had better try to live.”

— Kaliane Bradley

2. “The most radical thing I ever did was love him.”

— Kaliane Bradley

3. “So far as I understood the British Empire, other people’s countries were useful or negligible but rarely conceived of as autonomous. The empire regarded the world the way my dad regards the elastic bands the post deliverer drops on their round: This is handy, it’s just lying here; now it’s mine.”

— Kaliane Bradley

4. “Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.”

— Kaliane Bradley

5. “I note all this because I think male writers are often mocked for their lengthy descriptions of women’s breasts, but I do think some breasts provoke them, even from me.”

— Kaliane Bradley

6. “Yes. I’m not telling you that I like it or that I understand it. God is a captain whose orders I must trust. He knows this ship better than I.”

— Kaliane Bradley

7. “Even for her, girlishness was a habit that was hard to break – for safety, for camouflage.”

— Kaliane Bradley

8. “He was funny, that was the problem. Funny men are bad for the health.”

— Kaliane Bradley

9. “Can you swim?” “What?” “If I push you in the river, will it be murder?”

— Kaliane Bradley

10. “This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”

— Kaliane Bradley

11. “Because she is grieving, and grief will always take one out of time.”

— Kaliane Bradley

12. “Sometimes, just under my tongue, I felt the exclamation marks I put into my speech, demarcating the sentences I didn’t mind being broken off from my agency, as long as I was assured I would be protected from the outcome.”

— Kaliane Bradley

13. “What about all the stuff you said about not changing history?’ ‘People aren’t history,’ said Adela scornfully. ‘Good grief, why didn’t I listen to anything anyone told me when I was young? As long as the Ministry rises to power, then history happened the way we said it did.”

— Kaliane Bradley

14. “He smiled directly into my face for the first time, his dimples notched his cheeks like a pair of speech marks.”

— Kaliane Bradley

15. “He lives in me like trauma does. If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.”

— Kaliane Bradley

16. “What is a ‘feminist killjoy’?” “Er – ” “Have they a base? Mayhap a uniform? If not, I will design it. Ah, you laugh! But would we not look well in thigh boots and tabards broidered with FEMINIST KILLJOY? It sends a sturdy message.”

— Kaliane Bradley

17. “Autumn stomped on. The days moldered and dampened, like something lost at the back of the fridge.”

— Kaliane Bradley

18. “Despite being out of uniform, he looked oddly formal, as if he was the sole person in serif font.”

— Kaliane Bradley

19. “I let her leave without saying goodbye and sat in the pool of silence that followed the crash of the front door slamming shut. This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.”

— Kaliane Bradley

20. “Very unladylike.” “Don’t worry, my womb is firmly strapped in.”

— Kaliane Bradley

21. “We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the floor of the madhouse.”

— Kaliane Bradley

22. “He was good at sidestepping questions he didn’t want to answer, and had a talent for whimsical humor that distracted them from the gaps he left.”

— Kaliane Bradley

23. “An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.”

— Kaliane Bradley

24. “And then when she was given a second chance, she caught the sword and came up singing.”

— Kaliane Bradley

25. “Belief has very little to do with rationale. Why demand a map for uncharted territory?”

— Kaliane Bradley

26. “Control’s lectures were nakedly about getting the narrative right. In their much-edited correctness, their placid-voiced hectoring, they bankrupted the energy in the room. Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.”

— Kaliane Bradley

27. “There he is, there he is. I wish I could tell you how it felt to see him. He’d always lived inside me, years before I’d known him. I’d been trained to love him.”

— Kaliane Bradley

28. “I am delighted to discover that, even in the future, the English have not lost the art of ironic understatement,” he said without looking at me.”

— Kaliane Bradley

29. “I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn’t know what to do.”

— Kaliane Bradley

30. “These stars were a temporary, beautiful gift of our era – the era that we all shared, a human era. I’d die one day, just like everyone else, so I had better try to live.”

— Kaliane Bradley

31. “Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future.”

— Kaliane Bradley

32. “They fed us all poison from a bottle marked “prestige,” and we developed a high tolerance for bitterness.”

— Kaliane Bradley

33. “Every time I told Graham something – about myself, about my family, about my experience of the world we shared – I was trying to occupy space in his head. I had ideas for the shape I should take in his imagination. I told him only what I wanted him to know and believe about me. But afterward, I’d sometimes feel ill, like I was glutted on sweetmeats and dizzy with wine. It seemed a reckless indulgence: to have the appetite to admit, for certain, what I was and was not.”

— Kaliane Bradley

34. “How could this have been allowed to happen?’ he asked. I shook my head. ‘People know,’ I mumbled, ’and then they choose not to know.”

— Kaliane Bradley

35. “Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.”

— Kaliane Bradley

36. “A man of marble where all others are of clay.”

— Kaliane Bradley

37. “Holding me in his arms, the way that poems hold clauses.”

— Kaliane Bradley

38. “He was determined to make me eat a coconut. Have you ever eaten a coconut?’ ‘I have.’ ‘I’d never experienced a fruit that fought back so hard against being eaten.”

— Kaliane Bradley

39. “You’ll have lived through heat waves by now, and you’ll know that they make time go utterly Dali clocks.”

— Kaliane Bradley