Top 180 Marie Rutkoski Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Sometimes when the god is vexed or simply bored, she decides that the most beautiful thing is disaster.”

— Marie Rutkoski

52. “Arin pulled her onto his lap. He held her shaking form, tucked his face into the crook of her cold neck as she sobbed against him. He murmured that he loved her more than he could say. He promised that he would always choose her first.”

— Marie Rutkoski

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

— Marie Rutkoski

54. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

56. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

65. “You are important to me,” she said, and touched his face. Important. The word swelled and deflated. More than he’d thought. Less than he wanted.”

— Marie Rutkoski

66. “Feelings like guilt and anxiety and missing people should have a certain life span.”

— Marie Rutkoski

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

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

— Marie Rutkoski

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

— Marie Rutkoski

72. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

74. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

79. “The house burst into being. It.”

— Marie Rutkoski

80. “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

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

— Marie Rutkoski

82. “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

83. “I’m going to miss you when I wake up.”

— Marie Rutkoski

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Kestrel, you are not a basket.”

— Marie Rutkoski

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Let Arin surprise us,” Roshar said. “That’s how we do things. He comes up with something brilliant and I take the credit.”

— Marie Rutkoski

96. “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

97. “Arin wished Roshar wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t slip on false arrogance as if it were mourning garb worn in the service of a joke.”

— Marie Rutkoski

98. “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

99. “She’d wanted to put her fear inside a white box and give it to Arin. You, too, she would tell him. I fear for you. I fear for me if I lost you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

100. “When she saw the opportunity to flee, she would take it. She would bring the hounds of the empire howling down on this city.”

— Marie Rutkoski