Top 180 Marie Rutkoski Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Before – for years – she had let her mind close seamlessly, like an egg, around this wrong and other wrongs.”

— Marie Rutkoski

152. “It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice.”

— Marie Rutkoski

153. “He told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn’t time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was upon him. Arin had been born in the year of the god of death, and he was finally glad of it. He surrendered himself to his god, who smiled and came close. Stories will get you killed, he murmured in Arin’s ear. Now, you just listen. Listen to me.”

— Marie Rutkoski

154. “I won’t play you because even when I win, I lose. It’s never been just a game between us.”

— Marie Rutkoski

155. “A window is just a window. Colored glass: mere glass. But in the sun it becomes more. She would show him, and say, love should do this.”

— Marie Rutkoski

156. “I will remember you perfectly. My memory will touch your skin, your lips. The memory will hurt, but it will be mine.”

— Marie Rutkoski

157. “Arin smiled. It was a true smile, which let her know that all the others he had given her were not.”

— Marie Rutkoski

158. “Her love for him closed within her like a fist. Nervous, bruised. She despised it. Wasn’t it the love of a beaten animal, slinking back to its master? Yet here was the truth: she missed her father.”

— Marie Rutkoski

159. “If she had to choose which aspect of the suite she despised most, it would have been a hard call between the lock and the garden, though these days she nursed a particular grudge against the curtains.”

— Marie Rutkoski

160. “It was wrong to want to touch a scar and call it beautiful.”

— Marie Rutkoski

161. “A lovely fatigue claimed him. He lay down on the grass and listened. He thought about how Kestrel had slept on the palace lawn and dreamed of him. When she had told him this, he’d wished that it had been real. He tried to imagine the dream, then found himself dreaming.”

— Marie Rutkoski

162. “Bones must be silent like this, Kestrel thought, when they lay deep in the earth.”

— Marie Rutkoski

163. “Isn’t that... isn’t that what friends do? They change our perspective on the world. Part of why we care about them is because we love that feeling. The feeling of being changed.”

— Marie Rutkoski

164. “She entered Roshar’s tent. “I need your help.” Blinking, he propped himself up on his bed. He said groggily, “And I need a real door. With a lock.”

— Marie Rutkoski

165. “She looked into the shadowed corners of the room. Talking with him was like having a flower unfold inside her chest, then close up tight. Creep open. Collapse in on itself.”

— Marie Rutkoski

166. “They had been dreamers. Her father always said that this was why they had been easy to conquer.”

— Marie Rutkoski

167. “He knew how it was to have no family: like living in a house with no roof.”

— Marie Rutkoski

168. “It is a midnight lie, she said. A kind of lie told for someone else’s sake, a lie that sits between goodness and wrong, just as midnight is the moment between night and morning. Or a lie that is not technically false, like a misleading truth.”

— Marie Rutkoski

169. “When an ice wind comes to the city, indi flowers freeze along the white walls. Purple enameled petals chatter in the wind. Then the cold snap passes. Petals melt and fall from their stems. New flowers grow, fluffy and thick. I love the flowers. They are so strong. Really, they are a weed, and destructive. The vines cannot easily be ripped out. They must be chopped. Over time, they can crack and crumble a wall. But I love them for that, too.”

— Marie Rutkoski

170. “Nirrim could have wondered about the truth of what she had lost for every moment of her little life, but she could not have named it, for it was compassion, and it remains the fate of all humans who lack compassion never to understand that they lack it.”

— Marie Rutkoski

171. “A snake will not stay to please you. It will do nothing it does not want to do.”

— Marie Rutkoski

172. “Never apologize for who you are or what you needed to do to be yourself.”

— Marie Rutkoski

173. “I was lonely for her even though she was right in front of me.”

— Marie Rutkoski

174. “At heart I took comfort in what I knew, the sure things of the world: stones, hot bread, old wood, and yes, the wall – how high it was, how small it made me feel, as though I were at the bottom of a great bowl. The wall kept me in, but it also kept the unknown out.”

— Marie Rutkoski

175. “Wanting something doesn’t always mean it is owed to you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

176. “It was a new thought to me: that you could take heart when someone escapes the trap that trapped you.”

— Marie Rutkoski

177. “Her eyes flashed, became jewels of joy. It was treasure, the way she looked at him.”

— Marie Rutkoski

178. “People can refuse to see a possibility. Maybe they don’t want it. Maybe it never occurs to them, or is even awful to them. But people make bad choices when they don’t know the full range of choices. People come to wrong conclusions if they don’t understand all the possible questions.”

— Marie Rutkoski

179. “Later, I wished that I had called to her, that I had said I missed her as soon as she turned to walk away. I wished she had seen how I brought my hand to my cheek. Her touch shivered down my back.”

— Marie Rutkoski

180. “Sid the sly, they call me. As bad as a boy. Only now do I realize that I might not be this way if it hadn’t always been clear that there would be no story for me, no tale wrapped like a present that gets to be opened again and again to reveal the kind of love my parents have, the kind that everyone sighs over, because it is forever. The kind that makes a family. Who would I be, how would I have acted, what might I have said to Nirrim, if I had ever believed that kind of story could be mine?”

— Marie Rutkoski

181. “Is home a home if you can never leave it? You think you’re in prison now, but you have been in prison your whole life. It’s just big enough that you’re able to forget what it really is. Don’t you want to see more?”

— Marie Rutkoski

182. “I suppose I can’t be believed even when I’m telling the truth,” Sid said. “It’s the liar’s curse.”

— Marie Rutkoski

183. “She smoothed flyaway hair off my brow. Yes, he imprisoned me, but I imprisoned him first. Do not worry, tadpole. He is mine, and I am his. Always.”

— Marie Rutkoski

184. “Sid rubbed the nape of her neck, studying me. Then she stuffed her hands into her pockets, hunching her shoulders. Quietly, she said, “You are my favorite impossible person.”

— Marie Rutkoski