Top 160 Kate Quinn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Many a gem lies hidden in darkness and oblivion.”

— Kate Quinn

2. “I believe in revenge... I’ve lost faith in much over the years, but not that.”

— Kate Quinn

3. “Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.”

— Kate Quinn

4. “Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. “What?” “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.”

— Kate Quinn

5. “People are stupid. Stick a halfway d-decent story and a random bit of paper under their nose, and with plenty of self-possession one can always get through.”

— Kate Quinn

6. “Osla Kendall is lightly fictionalized from the real-life Osla Benning, a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip’s long-term wartime girlfriend.”

— Kate Quinn

7. “Life is not a math problem, Charlotte.” If it was, I’d have been a lot better at it. I’d often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve. Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer here to solve for.”

— Kate Quinn

8. “Building a generation is like building a wall – one good well-made brick at a time, one good well-made child at a time. Enough good bricks, you have a good wall. Enough good children, you have a generation that won’t start a world-enveloping war.”

— Kate Quinn

9. “Big hat, no cattle.”

— Kate Quinn

10. “Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld, so the classics tell us, and there is nothing more potent than forgetfulness.”

— Kate Quinn

11. “That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”

— Kate Quinn

12. “What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?”

— Kate Quinn

13. “Steel blades such as you and I do not measure against the standards for ordinary women.”

— Kate Quinn

14. “But if men are the makers and breakers of empires, then women are the makers and breakers of men.”

— Kate Quinn

15. “If he doesn’t love me in a boiler suit, he’s not worth dressing up for in the first place.”

— Kate Quinn

16. “Put profit above all else – country, family, God – and there wasn’t much left to stop you getting it.”

— Kate Quinn

17. “Moments like this should have been glorious, and they never were. The monsters always looked so ordinary and pathetic, in the flesh.”

— Kate Quinn

18. “Every night, tell yourself what you told me. How you’re a patriot, not a traitor. How you’re the hero of this story, not the villain.” Beth smiled. “Then remember that you got an innocent woman locked in a madhouse to save your own skin, and ask yourself: how goddamned heroic is that?”

— Kate Quinn

19. “Each morning she woke with alacrity, tossing the covers aside and springing from bed, her mind one long hungry scream for what the day had to offer.”

— Kate Quinn

20. “Native of both countries, at home in neither.”

— Kate Quinn

21. “I am Athena. Before that I was Thea, singer and slave and lover of gladiators. Before that I was Leah, daughter of Benjamin and Rachael of Masada. I am as mortal as you, you common little man. And I fear no one!”

— Kate Quinn

22. “I undertake to be burnt by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten by rods, and to die by the sword.”

— Kate Quinn

23. “If you don’t know what lies ahead, make a good dramatic entrance and hope for the best.”

— Kate Quinn

24. “You’re smarter than any woman I know, a wee little adding machine in a black dress, and I like that. You’ve got a sharp tongue, and I like that too. You try to save everyone you meet, from your cousin and your brother to hopeless cockups like Gardiner and me, and I like that most of all. So I’m here to take you to dinner. I’m here in a jacket.” Pause. “I hate jackets.”

— Kate Quinn

25. “Because we can keep on. Others, they try keeping on, they just... ” she mimed an explosion. “It’s too much for them. They come to pieces. Not us. Hunters, they are different. We can’t stop. Not for bad sleep or parachute dreams or people who say we should want peace and babies instead. It’s a world full of mad wolves, and we hunt them til we die.” 61%.”

— Kate Quinn

26. “It doesn’t do to look too envious of other women. Men are already quite vain enough thinking we fight each other like cats for their attention, aren’t they? – Giulia Farnese.”

— Kate Quinn

27. “The habit of nagging, let me assure you, goes with a nurse no matter what she does.”

— Kate Quinn

28. “Never trust a German to get a sauce right. Their solution to everything is just add more butter.”

— Kate Quinn

29. “So you’re met Finn. He’s a dash, isn’t he? If I weren’t older than dirt and ugly as sin, I’d climb that like a French alp.”

— Kate Quinn

30. “Poetry is like passion – it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.”

— Kate Quinn

31. “There are more war criminals out there than we will ever be able to find. If I have to let go of the ones that won’t get found unless we turn into torturers, I’m at ease with that decision.”

— Kate Quinn

32. “Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.”

— Kate Quinn

33. “The idea made her sick and scared, but so what? Why did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway?”

— Kate Quinn

34. “Face like a potato, temper like a prison wardress.”

— Kate Quinn

35. “If part of that heart was always out of reach, that seemed entirely fair to Ian. You did not get a whole heart when you pinned yours to a splendid, battered, high-flying hawk like a nightwhich. Nina’s soul would always, in some deep place, yearn to be flying under a bomber’s moon with her dark-eyed Moscow rose. 99%.”

— Kate Quinn

36. “Rose wasn’t going to write a book or swim the Channel or do anything different – because once you’re pregnant, you’re finished.”

— Kate Quinn

37. “Life ought to be more like a play; the entrances and exits would be a lot cleaner.”

— Kate Quinn

38. “No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to.”

— Kate Quinn

39. “Snipers must make themselves calm in order to succeed, and that is why women are good at sharpshooting. Because there is not a woman alive who has not learned how to eat rage in order to appear calm.”

— Kate Quinn

40. “The kind of home where a child learned quickly to slide unseen around the edges of rooms, to vanish like a shadow in a black night at the first rumble on the domestic horizon.”

— Kate Quinn

41. “The nightmare hours belonged to happier conversations.”

— Kate Quinn

42. “I always eat when I defraud convents.”

— Kate Quinn

43. “Some men ogle, some men look. The first makes us bristle, and the second makes us melt, and men are at an utter loss knowing the difference. But we do, and we know it at once.”

— Kate Quinn

44. “I’m done loving sweet-souled long lashed idealists who dream of flight... She would find some clear eyed hunter with a heart like a diamond.”

— Kate Quinn

45. “Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty.”

— Kate Quinn

46. “It’s what a man does when he likes a lass. Puts on a jacket. Puts a shine on his shoes. Asks her to dinner.”

— Kate Quinn

47. “Maybe it is all rotten, but if the good ones leave, who’s there to make it better after the war? I know why you have to leave, Ninochka. It’s leave or nothing. But I can’t give up my homeland and my oath for love. That’s the kind of thing that makes men say little princesses have no place at the front.”

— Kate Quinn

48. “Empresses,” Vix said in disgust. “They’re always trouble, the tricky bitches. Emperors might forgive you if you cross them, but never empresses.”

— Kate Quinn

49. “I believe in my stars. I’ll make them go where I want.”

— Kate Quinn

50. “Nina took the air, feeling her arms disappear into the wings, her blood into the fuel line.”

— Kate Quinn