Top 70 Rory Power Quotes (2026 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. “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

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

— 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 has her girl. I’m missing both of mine.”

— 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. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

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

— Rory Power

17. “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

18. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Rory Power

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Rory Power

28. “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

29. “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

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

— Rory Power

31. “When you know that no matter what, you can’t be touched by something like this. Tess is in no danger. She never has been, but she certainly isn’t now, not when it was me the police kept pinned between them. Me, with a matching body out on the road. “You really do believe me, then?” I ask.”

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power

33. “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

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

— Rory Power

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “But Byatt’s our girl.” I’m watching Reese’s face, and I have her. I know I do. “We are supposed to protect her. Just like she’d do it for us.” I take a deep breath. “Just like I’d do it for you.”

— Rory Power

39. “I like how she talks without talking. I even like how she doesn’t always like me.”

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power

41. “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

42. “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

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

— Rory Power

44. “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

45. “But you’re stronger than me, Margot. You are. You bore what I never could.” And the thing is, I know she means it like praise. Like pride. But it isn’t to me. Because yes, I bore this. I fixed it, but there’s a voice in my head, one I’ve never really heard before, and it says, I shouldn’t have had to.”

— Rory Power

46. “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

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

— Rory Power

49. “And we love him,” Mrs. Miller says. “But until you live under your own roof, you’ll ask me or your father before you invite someone in.” She glances at me and Gram. “To stay the night,” she adds, clearly for our benefit.”

— Rory Power

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

— Rory Power