Top 180 Marie Rutkoski Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Kestrel had bought a life, and loved it, and sold it.”

— Marie Rutkoski

52. “Gorgeous?” Ronan tried again. “Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn’t been invented to describe you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

53. “The world went luscious, and slow, and still.”

— Marie Rutkoski

54. “Like she had broken her own heart. Kestrel felt the pieces of her heart suddenly, as if love had been an object, something as frail as a bird’s egg, its shell an impossible cloudy pink. She saw the shock of its bloody yolk. She felt the shards of shell pricking her throat and lungs.”

— Marie Rutkoski

55. “In war, her father sometimes said, you might live, you might die. But if you panic, death is the only outcome.”

— Marie Rutkoski

56. “It was the kind of knowledge that, once it enters you, seems like it’s lived there forever.”

— Marie Rutkoski

57. “Sometimes when the god is vexed or simply bored, she decides that the most beautiful thing is disaster.”

— Marie Rutkoski

58. “He’d believed it. She couldn’t believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.”

— Marie Rutkoski

59. “He struggled, knuckled his eyes, and let the words come. “I want you to be mine, wholly mine, your heart, too. I want you to feel the same way.”

— Marie Rutkoski

60. “His dark head bowed, became lost in its own shadow.”

— Marie Rutkoski

61. “She struggled not to show this. Already, that dream on the grass had faded in her memory. It was as if she’d worn it out by thinking too much about it. But in the moment, it had felt so real. Kestrel couldn’t quite believe that it hadn’t been.”

— Marie Rutkoski

62. “How could she have forgotten what this was like, to burn on a fuse before him?”

— Marie Rutkoski

63. “Arin imagined how, if he could, he would kneel before the boy he had been. He’d cradle himself to his chest, let the child bury his wet face against his shoulder. Shh, Arin would tell him. You will be lonely, but you’ ll become strong. One day, you will have your revenge.”

— Marie Rutkoski

64. “I did not, in the end, want to share the truth, because the words of love inside me felt like the only part of her that could ever remain mine.”

— Marie Rutkoski

65. “The snow fell on her, it fell on him, but Kestrel knew that no single flake could ever touch them both. She didn’t look back when he spoke again. “You don’t, Kestrel, even though the god of lies loves you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

66. “The emperor leaned back in his seat. His cup of chocolate steamed, veiling his face as he tipped his chin and studied Kestrel with a slanting gaze.“Very neat of you, Lady Kestrel. You solve all my worries. You hand me the plains for the low price of poison. How nice that you minimize our enemy’s civilian casualties at the same time.”

— Marie Rutkoski

67. “I pity who I was then: a girl riven by her mistake, beholden to the needs of others, and trained to disminish her own. I was a snake that had not yet learned to strike.”

— Marie Rutkoski

68. “So you tell me what would make a good, quiet girl get herself in trouble, especially when she had so much to lose. Tell me.”

— Marie Rutkoski

69. “Sometimes you think you want something,” Arin told him, “when in reality you need to let it go.”

— Marie Rutkoski

70. “He sat on the wide windowsill, spine against the frame. He was aware of feeling both inside and outside. He let himself enjoy the balance of it. It cleared his head.”

— Marie Rutkoski

71. “She remembered her letter confessing every thing to Arin. I am the Moth. I am your country’s spy, she’d written. I have wanted to tell you this for so long. She’d scrawled the emperor’s secret plans. It didn’t matter that this was treason. It didn’t matter that she was supposed to marry the emperor’s son on First-summer’s day, or that her father was the emperor’s most trusted friend. Kestrel ignored that she’d been born Valorian. She’d written what she felt. I love you. I miss you. I would do anything for you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

72. “She had done everything she could. And he didn’t even know.”

— Marie Rutkoski

73. “Part of privilege is not having to look at ugly things.”

— Marie Rutkoski

74. “I don’t mind being a moth. I would probably start eating silk if it meant that I could fly.”

— Marie Rutkoski

75. “Once, he’d hated her for it. Then it had somehow touched him. He knew it himself. he, too, felt how the heart chooses its own home and refuses reason.”

— Marie Rutkoski

76. “She focused on that nothingness, imagined it as ink spilling over everything she could possibly think or feel.”

— Marie Rutkoski

77. “The cannons held their breath. Vanguard crashed into vanguard. She saw the collision happen a few ranks ahead. The spurt of blood. Hideous masks of fear and hatred. An arm shorn from the shoulder. Bodies shoved from horses, crumpled into the sand beneath hooves. And the cruelty of what she couldn’t see.”

— Marie Rutkoski

78. “I fear for you. I fear for me if I lost you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

79. “She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.”

— Marie Rutkoski

80. “I have three younger siblings, and used to tell them an awful lot of lies when they were growing up. The best thing about being a writer is that now I can say that my lies were all in the name of literary creativity. Unfortunately, my brothers and sister don’t believe me.”

— Marie Rutkoski

81. “It made him wonder which pain was greater: to give up something precious, or to see it taken away.”

— Marie Rutkoski

82. “The house burst into being. It.”

— Marie Rutkoski

83. “He didn’t smile. He cupped her face with both hands. An emotion tugged at his expression, a dark awe, the kind saved for a wild storm that rends the sky but doesn’t ravage your existence, doesn’t destroy every thing you love. The one that lets you feel saved.”

— Marie Rutkoski

84. “I wish I could teach you how to live happily ever after, Petra,” she said, “but that is something you will have to learn on your own.”

— Marie Rutkoski

85. “She breathed in the cold, and it felt free, so she felt free, and it felt alive, so she felt alive.”

— Marie Rutkoski

86. “She would have stopped him. She would have wished herself deaf, blind, made of unfeeling smoke. She would have stopped his words out of terror, longing. The way terror and longing had become indistinguishable.”

— Marie Rutkoski

87. “Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn’t.”

— Marie Rutkoski

88. “Kestrel raised one brow. “How very surprising. Didn’t you just make a promise and ask me to trust your word? Really, Arin. You must sort out your lies and your truths or even you won’t know which is which.”

— Marie Rutkoski

89. “Kestrel, you are not a basket.”

— Marie Rutkoski

90. “He did not want her to know. He did not want her to see. But: Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her. Look at me. She lifted her eyes, and did.”

— Marie Rutkoski

91. “Maybe love was easy, she thought. Maybe her past wasn’t vital as her present, she thought. But then she heard her father say that she’d broken his heart, and she could no longer believe that either thought was true.”

— Marie Rutkoski

92. “She felt far away and horribly grounded at the same time, like her heart had been torn from her body and lost, and she didn’t know whether she was her heart or her body.”

— Marie Rutkoski

93. “I’m not sure that not knowing is the same thing as innocence.”

— Marie Rutkoski

94. “Brother, you are mad,” said the queen. “He loves me,” Roshar protested. The cub was sleeping huddled against Rosher’s leg. “And when it has grown, and is large enough to eat a man?” “Then I’ll make Arin take care of him.”

— Marie Rutkoski

95. “Every chip of her being slid into place, into the image of a lost world. The boy discovering it. The girl who sees it spark and flare, and understands, now, what she feels. She realizes that she has felt this for a long time.”

— Marie Rutkoski

96. “Roshar drew himself up to his full height. He folded his arms, rippling fingers along the biceps. “I could keep you here by force. In my country, we have laws about making sure crazy people don’t hurt themselves.”

— Marie Rutkoski

97. “She didn’t like the way he was right. How she listened. She wondered if there was any difference between how she listened to him and how Arin listened to his god.”

— Marie Rutkoski

98. “In the end she was here and he was free. She had done every thing she could. And he didn’t even know.”

— Marie Rutkoski

99. “Yet he understood that there are some things you feel and others that you choose to feel, and that the choice doesn’t make the feeling less valid.”

— Marie Rutkoski

100. “Kestrel felt a flicker of instinctive curiosity. Then she reminded herself bitterly that this was what curiosity had bought her: fifty keystones for a singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn’t her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers. Kestrel looked away from Arin. She swore to herself that she would never look back.”

— Marie Rutkoski