Top 80 Katherine Rundell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: it turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless.”

— Katherine Rundell

2. “Wolves are the witches of the animal world.”

— Katherine Rundell

3. “I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.”

— Katherine Rundell

4. “The dark-haired girl had the face of someone who had seen a lot, and wouldn’t mind punching most of it.”

— Katherine Rundell

5. “People say we can’t do anything about the way the world is; they say it’s set in stone. I say it looks like stone, but it’s mostly paint and cardboard.”

— Katherine Rundell

6. “It’s inhuman to take your books away before you know the end.”

— Katherine Rundell

7. “Cowardice is for cowards. Fear is for people with brains and eyes and functioning nerve endings.”

— Katherine Rundell

8. “Sometimes it seemed difficult for the adults in Sophie’s life to tell between ‘carried away’ and ’absolutely correct but unbelieved.”

— Katherine Rundell

9. “It was never too late, she said, to turn a living thing around, and a garden was the most living of things.”

— Katherine Rundell

10. “Never ignore a possible.”

— Katherine Rundell

11. “Wolves, like children, are not meant to lead calm lives.”

— Katherine Rundell

12. “The set of her chin suggested she might have slain a dragon before breakfast. The look in her eyes suggested she might, in fact, have eaten it.”

— Katherine Rundell

13. “You shouldn’t say what you don’t mean.”

— Katherine Rundell

14. “Books crowbar the world open for you.”

— Katherine Rundell

15. “I think, actually, everyone starts out with some strange in them. It’s just whether or not you decide to keep it.”

— Katherine Rundell

16. “Feo shook her head; she couldn’t speak. The moments in which the world turns suddenly kind can feel like a punctured lung. She stood in the marble hall and cried until tears flooded down her nose and chin and dropped on to the heads of the two bloodstained wolves at her feet.”

— Katherine Rundell

17. “Wolves, and stars, and snow: Those things made sense.”

— Katherine Rundell

18. “I don’t know where courage comes from. But I do know that if you can scrape together just a bit, more of it comes without your trying... So you don’t need a great lump of bravery: only a tiny breath of it.”

— Katherine Rundell

19. “Her face was built on the blueprint used for snow leopards and saints.”

— Katherine Rundell

20. “You will never be tougher than you are now. Children are the toughest creatures on the planet. They endure.”

— Katherine Rundell

21. “I just liked the idea that there’s still things that we don’t know. At school, it’s the same thing, every day. I liked that it might be all right to believe in large, mad, wild things.”

— Katherine Rundell

22. “To the three men in gray coats and golden buttons just cresting the hill, the pantomime was a strange one. The speck of green merged with the gray, and the black with the flash of red, as they shot off toward north.”

— Katherine Rundell

23. “A beetle lumbered up onto her arm, and she stilled herself, enjoying the tickling feeling of its thread-thin feet. It was deep green with shimmers of blue and turquoise, with pitch-black legs. She kissed it very softly. If happiness were a color, it would be the color of this beetle, thought Wil.”

— Katherine Rundell

24. “Feo wished she could explain – that the beauty of the world is itself a kind of company, and they lived in one of the most beautiful spots in the world. ‘You can make the snow a kind of friend, if you know how.”

— Katherine Rundell

25. “If, when reading and walking at the same time, he bumped into a lamppost, he would apologize and check that the lamppost was unhurt.”

— Katherine Rundell

26. “It’s dancing! It’s magical, actually. A kind of slowish magic. Like writing with your feet.”

— Katherine Rundell

27. “If hope is a thing with feathers, then libraries are wings.”

— Katherine Rundell

28. “But make sure the risks you take aren’t taken to impress someone else.”

— Katherine Rundell

29. “You look as though you own a minimum of one pony.”

— Katherine Rundell

30. “No harm in listening. Alexei’s a child, not a wizard. We don’t lose control of our brains by listening.”

— Katherine Rundell

31. “But the writing we call children’s fiction is not a childish thing: childish things include picking your nose and eating the contents, and tantruming at the failure to get your own way. The 45th President of America is childish. Children’s fiction has childhood at its heart, which is not the same thing.”

— Katherine Rundell

32. “Intoxicated with her success and his awed eyes, and with the way the wind rushed by and flicked delicate strands of saliva across her cheeks, Will spread out her arms, spun in a pirouette. Shumba chose that moment to stumble over a rabbit hole and with a terrific crash, that sounded and resounded for miles and miles of flei, Will fell into the long grass.”

— Katherine Rundell

33. “When Sophie had first learned to read, Charles had kept the whisky in a bottle labeled CAT’S URINE, so that Sophie would not touch it, but she had uncorked the bottle and sipped it, and then sniffed at the underside of the cat next door. They were not at all similar, though equally unpleasant.”

— Katherine Rundell

34. “To adore and to devour and to be devoured is its own kind of focus: a gasp of a different kind of oxygen.”

— Katherine Rundell

35. “It’s like they’ve forgotten everything important, isn’t it? I mean, forgotten things like cats and dancing exist.”

— Katherine Rundell

36. “Stories can start revolutions.”

— Katherine Rundell

37. “Her voice, he thought, was like water running over pebbles in sunshine.”

— Katherine Rundell

38. “Sophie and Charles did not live neatly, but neatness, Sophie thought, was not necessary for happiness.”

— Katherine Rundell

39. “There’s a lot writing about love at first sight. And what is love at first sight but recognition? It’s instant knowledge: that this is a person who will make your heart larger – a lover, a child. The same applies to places.”

— Katherine Rundell

40. “Neither could speak. It was the day that a silence settled on the pair of them, and they were bound close by it. Will felt, in that moment, too small to face such misery, but she knew that she would have to expand now, with a terrible rush, to fill the empty space.”

— Katherine Rundell

41. “Keep you secret, then, my darling. Everybody needs them. Secrets make you tough, and wily.”

— Katherine Rundell

42. “Humans, on the whole, Feo could take or leave; there was only one person she loved properly, with the sort of fierce pride that gets people into trouble, or prison, or history books.”

— Katherine Rundell

43. “Oh.′ A syllable can express a great deal. Will’s sounded of resignation but also of swear words, and the smell of rotting vegetation, and wary amusement and bitten fingernails.”

— Katherine Rundell

44. “It is difficult to sleep when you are besieged by hope.”

— Katherine Rundell

45. “He was not tall or broad, but when he grinned it was so vivid that he appeared to take up most of the street and at least half the sky.”

— Katherine Rundell

46. “What am I listening for, anyway?’ ‘A murmuration!’ said Charles. ‘A good omen.’ ‘A what-eration?’ ‘A murmuration. When the sea and wind murmur in time with one other; like people laughing.”

— Katherine Rundell

47. “Racism can’t be cured by black excellence when it’s caused by white ignorance.”

— Katherine Rundell

48. “The birds here make the birds in England look like they’re dressed for a job interview.”

— Katherine Rundell

49. “An Englishman without an umbrella is less than half a man,” he said. Matteo.”

— Katherine Rundell

50. “Crawling through dark tunnels in the company of hobbits, standing in front of oncoming trains waving a red flag torn from a petticoat: to read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow.”

— Katherine Rundell