Top 40 Kate Grenville Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love writing fiction – you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.”

— Kate Grenville

2. “This place had been here long before him. It would go on sighing and breathing and being itself after he had gone, the land lapping on and on, watching, waiting, getting on with its own life.”

— Kate Grenville

3. “Anyone can be lovely, but you are rare.”

— Kate Grenville

4. “Ebooks have many advantages – publishers don’t have to make guesses about how many books to print, books need never go “out of print”, and hard-to-find books can be easily available. So far, the only limitation seems to be finding a way for the writer to be paid.”

— Kate Grenville

5. “I think we all waste a lot of time measuring ourselves up against impossible standards in lots of ways. We need to learn a few things, one of which being that physical beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, including a lot that the women’s magazines have never even thought of.”

— Kate Grenville

6. “Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.”

— Kate Grenville

7. “How short a time a person had to be alive, he thought. How long to be dead.”

— Kate Grenville

8. “Ain’t nothing in this world just for the taking... A man got to pay a fair price for taking... Matter of give a little, take a little.”

— Kate Grenville

9. “Violence had an enlivening effect. As long as someone else was the victim it made the blood pump, gave the world an edge of glamour.”

— Kate Grenville

10. “The idea of perfection can be a tyrant you should overthrow, to gain your freedom.”

— Kate Grenville

11. “He had seen God in the night sky long before he understood its patterns.”

— Kate Grenville

12. “The dragons of twentieth-century life are ignorance, incompetence, slackness and disloyalty, she said.”

— Kate Grenville

13. “Many things in this place were bewildering, but the feel of her body was still the thing he knew best in all the world.”

— Kate Grenville

14. “Standing in the dusk watching the great yellow eye of the tram light rushing towards her, she understood why some words were worth binding in leather and handing on. In the darkest hour, all the other humans who’d known dark hours were there with you. They’d been to the dark places before you, and they were with you now.”

— Kate Grenville

15. “The self that had laughed and raised his glass and shouted out the words with the others seemed to him now to be foolishly, dangerously, disastrously innocent.”

— Kate Grenville

16. “You were alive for such a short time and then you went back into the great silence. The only ones who didn’t vanish were the artists. While you were reading their words and looking at their pictures they were still alive, and you shared some of their life too.”

— Kate Grenville

17. “Other people had religion to give them a connection to eternity, and good luck to them, but religion was too narrow for her, too unforgiving, too literal. Literature encompassed everything, forbade nothing, endorsed nothing. Writers, like scientists, had the greatest respect for the world as it truly was. Their job wasn’t to judge but to examine, to experiment, draft after draft, century after century.”

— Kate Grenville

18. “Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?”

— Kate Grenville

19. “Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together.”

— Kate Grenville

20. “It was a long time since whe’s been young and it was unlikely that she’d ever been lovely. She stood like a man, square-on. Her breasts pushed out the old tee-shirt, but it was clear from the way she stood that she’d forgotten about breasts being sexy. Her breasts made bulges in her shirt, the same way her knees made bulges in her black track pants, that was all.”

— Kate Grenville

21. “He hoped that all understanding might be as simple as a matter of scale. If a man had not a week, not a year, not even a lifetime – if he had millennia, aeons – all the seemingly erratic movements of heavenly bodies and earthly vicissitudes would turn out to have meaning. Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.”

— Kate Grenville

22. “It was a leap into the other.”

— Kate Grenville

23. “But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.”

— Kate Grenville

24. “I don’t think the physical object of a book has any sacred quality, so in principle I think ebooks are great – just another way for stories and story-tellers to connect.”

— Kate Grenville

25. “Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.”

— Kate Grenville

26. “Man had been given a brain that could think in numbers, and it could not be coincidence that the world was unlocked by that very tool. To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.”

— Kate Grenville

27. “When a dangerous dog falls ill, who will come to help?”

— Kate Grenville

28. “The pain of being unloved was pushed off to a distance where it could not touch. I became like those flat shining beetles that live in the heart of a rotten log, a creature of no dimension, able to disappear into the narrowest of cracks.”

— Kate Grenville

29. “With no one but blacks around him, other than his own son, Thornhill saw that their skins were not black, no more than his own was white. They were simply skins, with the same pores and hairs, the same shadings of colour as his own. If black skin was all there was to see, it was amazing how quickly it became the colour that skin was.”

— Kate Grenville

30. “Do not believe too quickly!”

— Kate Grenville

31. “I could so easily never have learned things that would stay with me now until I died; that I was complete as I was, with all my flaws and all my strenghts. That I took up space in the world, and that I was entitled to that space.”

— Kate Grenville

32. “What he and I had made together was honest and important. But his orbit, like mine, lay elsewhere. We had been given a gift from the universe, a momentary precious conjunction. It was not meant to last, only to be valued and its lesson taken to heart.”

— Kate Grenville

33. “But then I had unfolded too wildly, too recklessly, in the wrong place and at the wrong time and with the wrong person.”

— Kate Grenville

34. “There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time.”

— Kate Grenville

35. “By now I had learned enough about the narrowness of a woman’s choices to guess that they were not all harlots, only less lucky than I had been.”

— Kate Grenville

36. “A woman can do many things, but she has to bide her time.”

— Kate Grenville

37. “The creature that was me had crept away and left nothing more than the shell of a woman curled up on the bunk.”

— Kate Grenville

38. “For me, being together, fellow souls joined in fear, was some comfort. For him, that was weakness. In taking his hand I was telling him what I had seen, and that was something he could not allow.”

— Kate Grenville

39. “We were two sets of people inhabiting the same space, each set going about its affairs as if the other were not there.”

— Kate Grenville

40. “I felt myself to be as big as the night, free, a thing with no boundaries. The sky was infinite, the stars blazed like the exhilaration that filled me, their shifting pulses and shimmer a promise of time, space, eternity, all the things a woman never had. I was at last free to find my own size, and I was gigantic.”

— Kate Grenville

41. “That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person – even a loved person, and I was not loved – was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.”

— Kate Grenville

42. “But each new vexation brought the memory of the last, and the fact that it had been solved. Vexation was vexing, but idleness was like death.”

— Kate Grenville

43. “But the idea was stronger than the impossibility of it. Even to recognise that longing and give voice to it was a kind of power.”

— Kate Grenville