Top 70 Rory Power Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I shouldn’t have had to be strong. Not like that. I should have been able to break. Maybe one day all that strength can just be a gift my mother gave me, and not the tool I used to survive her. But I don’t think it’s today.”

— Rory Power

2. “Reese says my name once, just once. Stern and strong, and she believes I can do this, so I have to.”

— Rory Power

3. “Keep a fire burning; a fire is what saves you.”

— Rory Power

4. “Some things don’t belong to other people,” she says, tired and drifting. “Some things are just mine.”

— Rory Power

5. “Because I think I’d been looking for it all my life – a storm in my body to match the one in my head.”

— Rory Power

6. “But it’s not love, to give your wounds to someone else. I won’t be part of it. Not anymore.”

— Rory Power

7. “There’s no room to feel bad. If I feel that, I have to feel everything else.”

— Rory Power

8. “Sometimes I catch her about to cry. I used to think maybe it was that I reminded her of my father – the man she never talks about, the man who must have given me something. But then I stopped thinking about him at all. Started wondering about where Mom came.”

— Rory Power

9. “I’ve spent every day since I met her telling myself the wrong thing. Telling myself over and over that she was cold, when maybe she was burning the whole time.”

— Rory Power

10. “She’s never liked us much, not since she complained that there were no boys on the island, and Reese gave her the blankest look I’ve ever seen and said, “Plenty of girls, though.”

— Rory Power

11. “Some days it’s fine. Others it nearly breaks me. The emptiness of the horizon, and the hunger in my body, and how will we ever survive this if we can’t survive each other? “We’re gonna make it. Tell me we’re gonna make it.”

— Rory Power

12. “I miss the north side cliff and the waves below, and I miss the way the wind steals your breath like it never belonged to you in the first place.”

— Rory Power

13. “I just hope they do it quick, put the bullet between my eyes. I won’t fight it – I’ve earned it, I deserve it – but please, don’t make me wait.”

— Rory Power

14. “A sparking. I know this feeling. Just before a flare-up, there’s a moment. Hard to describe, hard to pin down, but for me it almost makes it worth it. The pain and the loss, all of it a fair price for this. This strength, this power, this eagerness to bare my teeth.”

— Rory Power

15. “I came here for Gram. For a family that might love me. And I could have it. I could stay here, I could wrap myself up in my last name and watch the mess we’ve made swallow the whole town. Watch what happened to Tess happen to a hundred other people, and one day, one day, have a daughter of my own, and pass it on to her. Isn’t that what I want? To be somewhere only I can belong? But it’s not love, to give your wounds to someone else. I won’t be part of it. Not anymore.”

— Rory Power

16. “I couldn’t stand it, sitting there with her like everything was fine. I can’t stand it now, either. She’s keeping things from me, just like Mom. A lifetime of people deciding for me what I need to know. That stops.”

— Rory Power

17. “For a second I can see it all laid out across her. The longing and the resignation and the betrayal, the sting of watching the island she loves steal the people she pretends she doesn’t.”

— Rory Power

18. “That yes, it’s exactly what they think, and nothing like it, and a hundred other things at once. I will always wish I were hers, and I will always want to be only my own. I haven’t found a way yet to make the two fit.”

— Rory Power

19. “Everything in my life, a gift and a wound at the same time. When will anything just be what it is?”

— Rory Power

20. “It all feels forgotten, like we’re the first people here in a hundred years. No tire tracks left on the road, no sign this was ever anything but what it is now. We shouldn’t be here. This place isn’t ours anymore.”

— Rory Power

21. “See how a body will change, to give you the best chance it can.”

— Rory Power

22. “I’m still bitter,” I say. “Nobody ever gave me anything for my first.” Byatt laughs, her hands moving quick to open the soup can, and she gives me the lid. “There. My gift to you.”

— Rory Power

23. “How could Gram do this? How could she come here and turn this place to ruin? Lives, people, real things in a real world and Gram took them in her hands like they were game pieces on a board. Tossed them aside.”

— Rory Power

24. “I should’ve called her my lifeline.”

— Rory Power

25. “Too many days laid out in a line. Nothing to put inside them.”

— Rory Power

26. “Even when there’s no bread, there’s always shampoo.”

— Rory Power

27. “She’s spent my whole life watching me grow, watching me turn into her, into Gram, into the sister she killed. Even if she didn’t know exactly how deep the sameness runs, even if she doesn’t now, it’s there in our faces. An echo in our voices. I don’t think I’d reach for me either.”

— Rory Power

28. “But it’s not love, to give your wounds to someone else.”

— Rory Power

29. “She has her girl. I’m missing both of mine.”

— Rory Power

30. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her the whole night, It was like she made sense, finally, in her father’s house, with mismatched furniture and the back door thrown open.”

— Rory Power

31. “I wonder if she’s feeling the same thing I am. Like I’m too much, too clumsy, and too blunt to live in a house of white carpet and delicate words.”

— Rory Power

32. “It’s like that, with all of us here. Sick, strange, and we don’t know why. Things bursting out of us, bits missing and pieces sloughing off, and then we harden and smooth over.”

— Rory Power

33. “I close my eye. I have to get used to it, to this guilt twisting inside me. I don’t think it’s ever going away.”

— Rory Power

34. “I’m on my way to being brand new.”

— Rory Power

35. “But it’s my life on the line if I pick this fight. Welch will have no problem killing me. She won’t lose a second of sleep.”

— Rory Power

36. “They turned off the electricity that month, but it was worth it. To her, anyway. And me, I went to school, and I came home, and I did my homework with a flashlight between my teeth. Made a life for myself inside the mess of my mother’s head, just like always.”

— Rory Power

37. “It’s complicated,” She says at last. “Or maybe I just wish it was.”

— Rory Power

38. “I am supposed to be quiet, I am supposed to be good, but I was born at war and I can only keep from fighting for so long.”

— Rory Power

39. “Tess, on the other hand, looks absolutely delighted. I remember how she sounded, talking about Phalene, talking about how boring it was. Some entertainment at last. It makes me a little ill.”

— Rory Power

40. “I think we’ve been standing on thin ice our whole lives, this thing she did waiting underneath us.”

— Rory Power

41. “Are you sure?” She tries for a smile. “Because you look terrible. Like, that’s a Beth in Little Women face.”

— Rory Power

42. “And maybe it’s spite or maybe it’s love but I can’t really tell them apart anymore.”

— Rory Power

43. “Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think that if she asked, I’d let her to the same to me.”

— Rory Power

44. “It’s not that she forgets about me. I really don’t think that’s it. More like Mom usually has only enough energy to look after one person, and that person’s always her.”

— Rory Power

45. “Reese is trying, but she can’t get it quite right, because nobody’s Byatt but Byatt, not even the girl in these memories. There’s this place in her, somewhere nobody can touch, not me or Reese or anyone. It’s just hers, and I don’t even know what it is, really, just that it’s there, and that she takes it with her when she goes.”

— Rory Power

46. “If we die it will be together, if she dies I am going with her.”

— Rory Power

47. “But that’s not true, is it? It means something else to be a Nielsen. I’d have been that girl in the field. The body in the burn.”

— Rory Power

48. “I don’t think the past ever really leaves, in Phalene. It breathes. It holds on.”

— Rory Power

49. “I’m sure there’s something she’s not saying. There’s no way we’re going into town just to be seen. Not with the body and the fire. And me.”

— Rory Power

50. “I think I’d give anything to know what happened to leave her like this. As long as it’s not waiting to happen to me.”

— Rory Power