Top 180 Marie Rutkoski Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Harder to know that her father had sent her here. Hard, horrible, the the way he had looked at her, disowned her, accused her of treason. She’d been guilty. She had done every thing that he believed of her, and now she had no father.”

— Marie Rutkoski

102. “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

103. “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

104. “Arin hadn’t fallen asleep on the deck of his strangely still ship, yet, it felt as if he’d been dreaming. As if dreams and memories and lies were the same thing.”

— Marie Rutkoski

105. “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

106. “Arin thought of Cheat, Tensen, Kestrel. He wondered if some part of him was drawn to lies. What was it that made him so easy to deceive?”

— Marie Rutkoski

107. “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

108. “But we don’t think too well when we want too much.”

— Marie Rutkoski

109. “Temptation was the color white. It was black ink, quivering at the point of a pen’s nib.”

— Marie Rutkoski

110. “No, Arin. Sit down. Other wise you’ll make an ass out of yourself, and that role is mine.”

— Marie Rutkoski

111. “Kestrel could say that she’d learned that one’s life is also the lives of others. A wrong is not an egg, separate unto itself and sealed. She could say that she understood the wrong in ignoring a wrong. She could say this, but the truth was that she should have learned it long before.”

— Marie Rutkoski

112. “Logic is a game, came the memory of his father’s voice. Let’s see how you play.”

— Marie Rutkoski

113. “How did you ever survive, little slave, with that mouth of yours?”

— Marie Rutkoski

114. “She thought that Arin had almost said that he wished there was no war, or that they could lose themselves in each without losing everything.”

— Marie Rutkoski

115. “Here.” He jerked at Arin’s armor and began unbuckling it. “Stop bleeding. Oh, just look at you. Arin, you’re a mess.”

— Marie Rutkoski

116. “The general’s voice came low, so that his words were only for him and his daughter. “Kestrel,” he said, “you have broken my heart.”

— Marie Rutkoski

117. “He had sleepless eyes, his mouth a little swollen, the deeply tanned skin somehow burnished. Kestrel thought that she, too, must look like this: polished by desire, the way a river stone holds a luster from having been made so smooth.”

— Marie Rutkoski

118. “Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game. Now.”

— Marie Rutkoski

119. “I agree,” Arin said, “under one condition. You mentioned emissaries. There will be one emissary from the empire. It will be you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

120. “He saw her. She knew that he saw her. But his eyes refused to see her. It was as if she were transparent. Like ice, or glass, or something equally breakable.”

— Marie Rutkoski

121. “What could you say about someone who walked daily into his grief and lived at the bottom of its hole and didn’t even want to come out?”

— Marie Rutkoski

122. “He hadn’t love her. She hadn’t loved him. Yet they’d cared for each other, and Kestrel remember how he’d set a soft black puppy into her hands. No one had given her such a gift. He’d made her laugh. That, too, was a gift.”

— Marie Rutkoski

123. “She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.”

— Marie Rutkoski

124. “Sometimes she wished she could eat herself. She’d swallow everything – her soiled blue dress, the shackles on her wrists, her puffy face. If she could eat herself up, there’d be no trace left of her or the mistakes she had made.”

— Marie Rutkoski

125. “In his mind, he said, Tell me what you want. And she said, Leave this city. She said, Take me with you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

126. “Her fierce creature of a mind: sleek and sharp-clawed and utterly unwilling to be caught.”

— Marie Rutkoski

127. “After ten years of slavery, Arin knew obedience in its many forms. The fear of pain, the gritty promise to oneself of vengeance. Hopelessness. A grinding monotony broken just often enough by the strap or fist.”

— Marie Rutkoski

128. “Her words came in a sudden rush. “You’re hard to look away from. I can’t look away from you. I don’t know how anyone could.”

— Marie Rutkoski

129. “As he spoke, it occurred to her that maybe he, too, felt like two people, that maybe everybody does, and that it’s not a question of whether one’s damaged, but of how easily or not that damage is seen.”

— Marie Rutkoski

130. “You will be lonely, but you’ll become strong.”

— Marie Rutkoski

131. “Kestrel lifted her gaze. As he met her eyes – an extremely light brown, the lightest shade before brown becomes gold – Arin knew that he was a fool. A thousand times a fool.”

— Marie Rutkoski

132. “Little Fists, what’s wrong?”

— Marie Rutkoski

133. “Stories will get you killed.”

— Marie Rutkoski

134. “Innocent? Her? Never.”

— Marie Rutkoski

135. “I don’t know you well,” Risha’s voice was low. “But I know what Verex has told me about you, and what I see for myself. You don’t need to be gifted with a blade. You are your own best weapon.”

— Marie Rutkoski

136. “Why we can’t remember when our mothers carried us inside them: the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one.”

— Marie Rutkoski

137. “I told her that I belong to you, and no other.”

— Marie Rutkoski

138. “Kestrel studied her fingers, the way they wove together. She didn’t say Come back safely, and he didn’t say I always have. She said what a Valorian should. “Fight well.”

— Marie Rutkoski

139. “I know you want her to be safe forever, but it’s just not that kind of world.”

— Marie Rutkoski

140. “I realized that wanting is a kind of power even if you don’t get what you want. Wanting illuminates everything you need, and how the world has failed you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

141. “Please understand. When I look at you as if you’re crazy, it’s not that I judge you for your insanity.”

— Marie Rutkoski

142. “Music made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her, and while she knew there were people and responsibilities in the darkness beyond it, she couldn’t see them. The flame of what she felt when she played made her deliciously blind.”

— Marie Rutkoski

143. “People come to wrong conclusions if they don’t understand all the possible questions.”

— Marie Rutkoski

144. “He wondered if he, too, was tempted by cunning. Maybe he was drawn as well to the biggest gamble.”

— Marie Rutkoski

145. “I love everything more when I leave it. Maybe, then, it’s the most I’ll ever love it.”

— Marie Rutkoski

146. “I like to wear a man’s clothes and I like that it startles people, and then even if I hate dresses I enjoy wearing one to show you that when you thought I was one thing and changed your mind you must now change it again. I like disappearing and showing up when I am least expected. I like pretending. Sometimes I forget myself, and fall for my own game.”

— Marie Rutkoski

147. “You talk about her as if she’s made of spun glass. Know what I see? Steel.”

— Marie Rutkoski

148. “An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or perhaps that it wasn’t how he had said it, and she was wrong, and she’d heard a question simply because the sound of him speaking her name made her wish that she were his answer.”

— Marie Rutkoski

149. “It occurred to me that it was a special person, a gentle one, who allowed another to keep her secrets.”

— Marie Rutkoski

150. “But sailors were much better adversaries than the average aristocrat. They flipped cards with feral tricks, swore when they lost, swore when they won, would gouge the last silver keystone coin out of a friend. And they cheated. Kestrel especially liked it when they cheated. It made beating them not quite so easy. She.”

— Marie Rutkoski