Top 180 Krystal Sutherland Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I pressed my fingertips lightly to her throat, right at the point where her heartbeat sprang beneath her skin. It was how we’d slept as children, our finger resting on one another’s pulse points, a cross-hatched thicket of wrists and necks and hands.”

— Krystal Sutherland

102. “Some people are born with an ear for music, some people are born with a talent for drawing, some people... have a built-in radar that tells them where a comma needs to go in a sentence.”

— Krystal Sutherland

103. “Grey was a tornado in the form of a girl. She took what she wanted and left a trail of destruction in her wake, and I had always admired her for it. It took guts to be a girl in this world and live like that.”

— Krystal Sutherland

104. “The goddess of crustaceans, our lady of hard exoskeletons.”

— Krystal Sutherland

105. “What would Vivi and I be without her? Would we drift apart in the cavernous space Grey left behind, rogue planets spun out into the abyss?”

— Krystal Sutherland

106. “She was of average height and average build and average attractiveness, all things that should’ve made it easy for her to assimilate into a new high school without any of the dramatic tropes that usually inhabit such storylines.”

— Krystal Sutherland

107. “Why did someone who was supposed to love me look at me like that?”

— Krystal Sutherland

108. “You are like the death flowers that grow rampant in your wake: lovely to look at, intoxicating even, but get too close and you will soon learn that there is something rank beneath. That’s what beauty often is, in nature. A warning. A disguise. Do you understand?”

— Krystal Sutherland

109. “There are things in every family that are not talked about. Stories you know without really knowing how you know them, tales of terrible things that cast long shadows over generations. Adelaide Fairlight’s three stillborn babies was one of those stories.”

— Krystal Sutherland

110. “Esther so badly wanted to save her father, to bring him back from the half death that had become his life. Every time he reminded her that he couldn’t be saved, Esther’s heart broke a little more.”

— Krystal Sutherland

111. “You shouldn’t keep the phone numbers of rapscallions who robbed you and left you for dead at bus stops, or stood you up on Valentine’s Day at age eight, even if they looked like Finn from Star Wars and dressed like the Fantastic Mr. Fox and smelled like heady cologne.”

— Krystal Sutherland

112. “In the four years since she’d left home, my eldest sister had grown into a gossamer slip of a woman with hair like spun sugar and a face out of Greek mythology. Even in still pictures there was something vaporous and hyaline about her, like she might ascend into the ether at any moment. It was perhaps why journalists were forever describing her as ethereal, though I’d always thought of Grey as more earthy. No articles ever mentioned that she felt most at home in the woods.”

— Krystal Sutherland

113. “I wondered, in that moment, if it was possible for human beings to go supernova – my atoms felt like they were emitting a shock wave of heat and light as they came unstuck from each other.”

— Krystal Sutherland

114. “My anxiety was a physical weight resting heavy inside my skull.”

— Krystal Sutherland

115. “I had witnessed the repercussions of being beautiful, of being pretty, of being cute, of being sexy, and of attracting the wrong kind of attention, not only from boys and men but other girls, other women.”

— Krystal Sutherland

116. “One day,” he said, “everybody’s gonna wake up and realize their parents are human beings, just like them. Sometimes they’re good people, sometimes they’re not.”

— Krystal Sutherland

117. “A thousand little moments had made Esther fall more and more in love with him, without her even noticing. A thousand little pieces of his soul had splintered off and dug themselves into her.”

— Krystal Sutherland

118. “We stood, breathing hard, and found each other’s free hand, knowing that the man had set our sister’s life on fire and all that was left of it now was what we held in our arms.”

— Krystal Sutherland

119. “The cat was older than me, and so threadbare and crooked she was beginning to look like a bad taxidermy.”

— Krystal Sutherland

120. “Maybe it was possible to love two different versions of someone at the same time. And maybe, just maybe, some people still anted redemption for sins they didn’t need absolved anymore.”

— Krystal Sutherland

121. “They’re my sisters,” I said quietly. Sometimes, asking to see them – but especially asking to see Grey – felt like asking for permission to take up shooting heroin as an extracurricular activity. “They aren’t going to let anything bad happen to me.”

— Krystal Sutherland

122. “Point is, you gotta be scared. Fear protects you. You gotta be scared right down to your bones” – he touched his fingertips to her collarbone – “for bravery to mean anything.”

— Krystal Sutherland

123. “What else was there to do? They were teenagers, and they were powerless, and until they were adults they had no choice but to let their destinies be bent and swayed by outside forces.”

— Krystal Sutherland

124. “For days at a time, she disappears off the face of the earth, okay? Won’t answer calls, misses work, dates, fittings. Everyone else got used to it. It was part of her mystery. Would she show up or wouldn’t she? All very exciting. But it sucks when you’re dating her. Your sister was a lousy girlfriend.”

— Krystal Sutherland

125. “The one in which I went punting on the River Cherwell and drank cider at summer picnics with my friends and spent long hours studying in libraries built inside the hallowed halls of old churches.”

— Krystal Sutherland

126. “Look up at that, Henry. Look up at that, honestly, and tell me you believe that our lives are anything more than a ridiculous cascade of random chances. A cloud of dust and gas forms our planet, a chemical reaction creates life, and then all of our cavemen ancestors live just long enough to bone each other before they die awful deaths. The universe is not the magical place people like to paint it as. It’s excruciatingly beautiful, but there’s no magic there, just science.”

— Krystal Sutherland

127. “I stayed alert while I ran home, the way women do, one AirPod out, a sharp slice of adrenaline carving up the line of my spine.”

— Krystal Sutherland

128. “I somehow knew, in that moment, that Grace Town was a jagged piece of glass that I’d cut myself on again and again if I let myself get involved with her. That the way forward would be pockmarked by sadness and grief and jealousy.”

— Krystal Sutherland

129. “What monstrous creatures humans would be if they could not die.”

— Krystal Sutherland

130. “By the time the police arrived, the woman’s eyes were wide and faraway, her limbs so liquid she could no longer stand and had to be carried out, limp as a drunk, by three officers.”

— Krystal Sutherland

131. “Good things come out of first drafts sometimes.”

— Krystal Sutherland

132. “Was it so bad to hold onto something that was broken?”

— Krystal Sutherland

133. “A girl, dressed in white, her fingertips dripping blood. “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Grey?” My oldest sister looked up at me. Her eyes were black and her white hair hung in filthy clumps around her face. “Run,” she said. She tried to take a step toward me but sank heavily to her knees. “He’s coming.”

— Krystal Sutherland

134. “Even the very best people found ways to hurt the ones they loved.”

— Krystal Sutherland

135. “She’s cute. In a weird, Janis Joplin, will probably die at twenty-seven kind of way.”

— Krystal Sutherland

136. “Esther wanted to make her brother understand that he was the sun. That he was bright and burning and brilliant, and without his warmth, without his gravity to orient herself around, she would be nothing. She wished they had that psychic twin thing, that she could push images into his head and make him see. Make him see that he was everything.”

— Krystal Sutherland

137. “She couldn’t help him, didn’t know how to help him, and that killed her. Not for the first time, she wished that his injuries were more obvious. That whatever swollen, infected thing inside his head that made him feel this way could be seen, could be sliced away, could be stitched up and covered with bandage like any other wound.”

— Krystal Sutherland

138. “If Grey were here, we’d likely be eating the tasting menu at Sketch and knocking back twenty-pound cocktails like they were candy.”

— Krystal Sutherland

139. “The magic had started to degrade, and Rosemary had slowly but surely become thoroughly, gruesomely human. And there were few things worse in this world than humans.”

— Krystal Sutherland

140. “The quiet, bright one who loved science and geography and had a natural flair for mathematics. The one who wanted desperately, above all else, to be unremarkable.”

— Krystal Sutherland

141. “I could rule this place with a small lobster army’, Esther muttered to herself. ‘Thirty, forty lobsters, tops, and I could be queen.”

— Krystal Sutherland

142. “Grace was a lost soul, a ghost adrift, the human embodiment of second-hand smoke.”

— Krystal Sutherland

143. “We each had black eyes and hair as white as milk. We each had enchanting four-letter names: Grey, Vivi, Iris. We walked to school together. We ate lunch together. We walked home together. We didn’t have friends, because we didn’t need them. We moved through the corridors like sharks, the other little fish parting around us, whispering behind our backs.”

— Krystal Sutherland

144. “That’s what getting to know someone is about. Judging them.”

— Krystal Sutherland

145. “Sometimes you’re brave if you run. Sometimes you’re brave if you stay. It’s important to know the difference.”

— Krystal Sutherland

146. “She was dressed like that old Cake song, in a short skirt and a long jacket. Two.”

— Krystal Sutherland

147. “Wow, she was obessed,” Vivi said as she turned the pages. “She never talked about it. She never wanted us to talk about it either. And the whole time she was scrapbooking like a bored housewife?”

— Krystal Sutherland

148. “Human beings could not be mended with gold seams.”

— Krystal Sutherland

149. “Losing him the first time had sucked, and had taught her a valuable life lesson: If you didn’t let people get close to you, they couldn’t hurt you when they left.”

— Krystal Sutherland

150. “She moved through the world like no other woman I knew.”

— Krystal Sutherland