Top 70 Rory Power Quotes (2024 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. “Some things don’t belong to other people,” she says, tired and drifting. “Some things are just mine.”

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power

6. “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

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

— Rory Power

8. “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

9. “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

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. “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

12. “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

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

— Rory Power

14. “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

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

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

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

— Rory Power

22. “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

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

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Rory Power

29. “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

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

— Rory Power

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Rory Power

34. “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

35. “Byatt’s carved her initials over and over. BW. BW. BW. She does that everywhere. On the bunk, on her desk in every class we had, on the trees in the grove by the water. Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think if she asked, I’d let her do the same to me.”

— Rory Power

36. “She’s right. I have decided that protecting this place is worth more than anything else. I have let Fairhaven wrap its arms around me, because nothing ever has before. But something isn’t good just because it wants me, is it? Gram’s not better than Mom. Her, kneeling in front of me, calling me her own – that’s just the other side of the coin. One day, I told myself, one day you’ll have to let go. Maybe that’s now.”

— Rory Power

37. “Lost Mom. So that’s why she left Phalene? A fire? That can’t be everything. She’s hidden this town from me my whole life – there has to be a bigger reason. For the secrecy, and for the way the police treat my last name like it’s a warning. “And that’s why Anderson thinks Nielsens are trouble?”

— Rory Power

38. “I should have seen it. I should have seen how she loves as hard as I do. Only I think it pins her down where it picks me up.”

— Rory Power

39. “My sister. She has to be. She looked exactly like me, and she was on your land. And I know you said you didn’t know what the police were talking about, I know that, but we’re not with them anymore, and you can be honest with me. You can just tell me you were keeping her.”

— Rory Power

40. “I came this way that first day here, looking for Mr. Miller. It’s the same now, only it isn’t at all. Why would Gram do this? None of this had to happen. Not a single moment.”

— Rory Power

41. “Usually, it was an accident. A lie I never set out to tell. A trick I never meant to play. I’d open my mouth, and something strange would come out, new and not mine. Like there was someone else inside.”

— Rory Power

42. “I’ve wondered. Of course I have. And I love Byatt more than anything, more than myself, more than the life I had before Raxter. But I know the warmth in my heart when I look at her. How it burns smooth and even, without a spark.”

— Rory Power

43. “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

44. “They’ve always told us the quarantine is the most important thing, but I’m choosing between it and Bryatt, it’s no choice at all.”

— Rory Power

45. “What I meant, what I wanted. They don’t matter anymore. We’re here, and that’s the rest of our lives.”

— Rory Power

46. “You mean you got her,” Mom says, and there, there, that’s the weak spot I have to keep aiming at. “It’s not worth it. I know you think you understand, but she can’t ever give you enough to make up for what she takes.” “Oh, I understand that,” I say. “I learned it from you.”

— Rory Power

47. “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

48. “We don’t get to choose what hurts us.”

— Rory Power

49. “I thought something of my old life would still be here. I thought something of us would have survived.”

— Rory Power

50. “She knew who she was and who I should be, and she fit right into all the places in me I couldn’t fill. Reese was different.”

— Rory Power