Top 90 Katherine Rundell Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Katherine Rundell

53. “One, from his face, appeared to be farting.”

— Katherine Rundell

54. “Children’s books in the house can be a dangerous thing in hiding: a sword concealed in an umbrella.”

— Katherine Rundell

55. “I still find libraries astonishing; I still think they speak to our better instincts. The library remains one of the few places in the world where you don’t have to buy anything, know anyone or believe anything to enter in.”

— Katherine Rundell

56. “Resist the urge to arrange your fears and angers at their most becoming angles.”

— Katherine Rundell

57. “And what is love at first sight but recognition?”

— Katherine Rundell

58. “He’d intended it to sound reassuring, but instead his voice had landed somewhere between “desperate lying” and “stern aunt on a deathbed.”

— Katherine Rundell

59. “Mothers are a thing you need, like air, she thought, and water. Even paper mothers were better than nothing; even imaginary ones. Mothers were a place to put down your heart. They were a resting stop to recover your breath.”

— Katherine Rundell

60. “Her finger was still bleeding, so she drew a flower behind the woman’s ear, and coloured it red.”

— Katherine Rundell

61. “Sophie realized she’d been holding her breath. She gulped in air. It was surprising what a difference oxygen made to bravery.”

— Katherine Rundell

62. “Don’t apologise. Your shoes are excellent; you sound like a tap dancer.”

— Katherine Rundell

63. “For reading not to become something that we do for anxious self-optimisation – for it not to be akin to buying high-spec trainers and a gym membership each January – all texts must be open, to all people.”

— Katherine Rundell

64. “The difficulties with the rule of readerly progression are many: one is that, if one followed the same pattern into adulthood, turning always to books of obvious increasing complexity, you’d be left ultimately with nothing but Finnegans Wake and the complete works of the French deconstructionist theorist Jacques Derrida to cheer your deathbed.”

— Katherine Rundell

65. “Children’s books are not a hiding place, they are a seeking place.”

— Katherine Rundell

66. “It’s best not to get too hungry if you can avoid it. If you get hungry enough, you will start feeling that your bad ideas are your good idea. If you get truly famished, you’ll start feeling like a French philosopher, and that’s unwise.”

— Katherine Rundell

67. “People do not tell you that love is so terrifying. It is less like rainbows and butterflies and more like jumping on to the back of a moving dragon.”

— Katherine Rundell

68. “I know these sorts of people. They’re not men. They’re mustaches with idiots attached.”

— Katherine Rundell

69. “Some sentences have the power to change everything. There are the usual suspects: I love you, I hate you, I’m pregnant, I’m dying, I regret to tell you that this country is at war. But the words with the greatest power to create both havoc and marvels are these: “I need your help.”

— Katherine Rundell

70. “What good is the research if no one will listen?”

— Katherine Rundell

71. “Children’s fiction needs to widen and change again, as it has widened and transformed before. Recently a study of children’s fiction in the UK showed that only four per cent of books published in a year had any characters who were black, Asian or minority ethnic, but that 31.2 per cent of school children are from minority ethnic origins.”

— Katherine Rundell

72. “Ask for it hot enough to burn your pipes, or it won’t be drinkable.”

— Katherine Rundell

73. “Do not wait for people to be faultless before you allow yourself to adore them. Adore them anyway. Such things are worth more than riddles.”

— Katherine Rundell

74. “Everybody needs secrets. Only be sure they are good ones.”

— Katherine Rundell

75. “Christopher looked hesitantly at the jaculus: it would be like attempting to commute on the back of a hummingbird.”

— Katherine Rundell

76. “To throw the knife would be death... She wanted nothing to do with death – nothing to do with finality, with endings, with the dark of it. She hated the man more than she hated any living thing, but he was living.”

— Katherine Rundell

77. “The lavellan has no interest in harming humans unless provoked, but its definition of ‘provoked’ is a broad one and can include sniffing, laughing and all forms of interpretive dance.”

— Katherine Rundell

78. “Muscles, she thought, are a thing worth having. They make the world easier to reach.”

— Katherine Rundell

79. “Hard work always hurts somewhere.”

— Katherine Rundell

80. “The riddles ensure that we tell our secrets to those who have already learned how to think.”

— Katherine Rundell

81. “Stop expecting life to get easier. It never does; that is not where its goodness lies.”

— Katherine Rundell

82. “Children are the toughest creatures on the planet, They endure.”

— Katherine Rundell

83. “God could arrest you for this,’ said Sergei. ‘This is better than murder.”

— Katherine Rundell

84. “Mal – “stop expecting life to get easier. It never does; that is not where its goodness lies. Or” – and she looked at Irian, at Nighthand – “do not wait for people to be faultless before you allow yourself to adore them. Adore them anyway. Such things are worth more than riddles.” There.”

— Katherine Rundell

85. “I wish for someone to be with. I wish to be un-alone.” He hoped shooting stars did not care about grammar.”

— Katherine Rundell

86. “It’s a thing worth knowing: that so very rarely do we discover that any living creature is simpler than we thought.”

— Katherine Rundell

87. “He told her about the small officers’ library, too, from which he sometimes stole books. ‘They’re the only good thing about the whole place. I sleep with a dictionary under my pillow, sometimes. Just to remind me that there are more words in the world than ‘Come here, boy.”

— Katherine Rundell

88. “That is why great power must never reside in only one person. It must be shared.” Her rough voice was rougher than before. “It must be spread, among as many good women and men as can be found; not because it is kind or polite or fair, but because it is the only way to beat back against horror.”

— Katherine Rundell

89. “But even airplanes heading toward Belgium can work magic, if you have luck and love and Christmas on your side.”

— Katherine Rundell

90. “What? But that’s crazy!’ ‘Governments often are.’ ‘I’m only just twelve! I’m practically still eleven.’ ‘Nonetheless, they intend to come.’ ‘Who is they? Who sent it?”

— Katherine Rundell

91. “None of us do. We none of us expected this. That is, in general, the nature of adventures. Adventurers tend to smell. The great epic tales stank, I think, more than the historians give them credit for.”

— Katherine Rundell

92. “Why didn’t she keep looking?” “My darling, because she is an adult.” Sophie ducked behind her hair. Her face was hot and tight and angry. “That’s not a reason.” “It is, my love. Adults are taught not to believe anything unless it is boring or ugly.”

— Katherine Rundell

93. “But it was not simple. Very little, after all, is ever simple.”

— Katherine Rundell

94. “Children’s books today do still have the ghost of their educative beginnings, but what they are trying to teach us has changed. Children’s novels, to me, spoke, and still speak, of hope.”

— Katherine Rundell

95. “The snow gossiped and hinted at storms and birds. It told a new story every morning. Few grinned and sniffed the sharpness of the air. It’s the most talkative weather there is...”

— Katherine Rundell