Top 200 Ruta Sepetys Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Was it harder to die, or harder to be the one who survived?”

— Ruta Sepetys

2. “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.”

— Ruta Sepetys

3. “Decisions, they shape our destiny.”

— Ruta Sepetys

4. “Krasivaya. It means beautiful, but with strength. Unique.”

— Ruta Sepetys

5. “Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness. There’s love and emotion trying to express itself, but at the time, it just ends up being awkward.”

— Ruta Sepetys

6. “Through hardship to the stars.”

— Ruta Sepetys

7. “I felt as if I were riding a pendulum. Just as I would swing into the abyss of hopelessness, the pendulum would swing back with some small goodness.”

— Ruta Sepetys

8. “We’d been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean.”

— Ruta Sepetys

9. “You stand for what is right, Lina, without the expectation of gratitude or reward.”

— Ruta Sepetys

10. “Whether love of friend, love of country, love of God, or even love of enemy – love reveals to us the truly miraculous nature of the human spirit.”

— Ruta Sepetys

11. “I adore themes of hope and courage and the ways we find meaning through suffering.”

— Ruta Sepetys

12. “Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness.”

— Ruta Sepetys

13. “I planted a seed of hatred in my heart. I swore it would grow to be a massive tree whose roots would strangle them all.”

— Ruta Sepetys

14. “Guilt is a hunter. My conscience mocked me, picking fights like a petulant child. It’s all your fault, the voice whispered.”

— Ruta Sepetys

15. “I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”

— Ruta Sepetys

16. “I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.”

— Ruta Sepetys

17. “A wrongdoing doesn’t give us the right to do wrong.”

— Ruta Sepetys

18. “What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?”

— Ruta Sepetys

19. “A tiny sliver of gold appeared between shades of gray on the horizon.”

— Ruta Sepetys

20. “The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the deadliest disaster in maritime history, with losses dwarfing the death tolls of the famous ships Titanic and Lusitania. Yet remarkably, most people have never heard of it. On January 30, 1945, four torpedoes waited in the belly of Soviet submarine S-13.”

— Ruta Sepetys

21. “They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light.”

— Ruta Sepetys

22. “They steal our power by making us believe we don’t have any,” said Bunu. “But words and creative phrases – they have power, Cristian. Explore that power in your mind.”

— Ruta Sepetys

23. “Did you ever wonder what a human life is worth?”

— Ruta Sepetys

24. “The Wilhelm Gustloff was pregnant with lost souls conceived of war. They would crowd into her belly and she would give birth to their freedom. But did anyone realize? The ship was christened for a man, Wilhelm Gustloff. My father had told me about him. He had been the leader of the Nazi Party in Switzerland. He was murdered. The ship was born of death.”

— Ruta Sepetys

25. “How did I get here How did I end up in the arms of a boy I barely knew but knew I didn’t want to lose I wondered what I would have thought of Andrius in Lithuania. Would I have liked him Would he have liked me.”

— Ruta Sepetys

Featured in: Romance Quotes

26. “I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart.”

— Ruta Sepetys

27. “What a group we were. A pregnant girl in love, a kindly shoemaker, an orphan boy, a blind girl, and a giantess who complained that everyone was in her way when she herself took up the most room. And me, a lonely girl who missed her family and begged for a second chance.”

— Ruta Sepetys

28. “Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.”

— Ruta Sepetys

29. “Some things just won’t go away, no matter how hard you scrub.”

— Ruta Sepetys

30. “That was something the war couldn’t take from me either. The Nazis couldn’t stop the wind and the snow. The Russians couldn’t take the sun or the stars.”

— Ruta Sepetys

31. “We’d been trying to touch the sky from the bottom of the ocean. I realized that if we boosted one another, maybe we’d get a little closer.”

— Ruta Sepetys

32. “War is catastrophe. It breaks families in irretrievable pieces. But those who are gone are not necessarily lost.”

— Ruta Sepetys

33. “Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way.”

— Ruta Sepetys

34. “Killers aren’t always assassins. Sometimes, they don’t even have blood on their hands.”

— Ruta Sepetys

35. “What was life asking of me? How could I respond when I didn’t know the question?”

— Ruta Sepetys

36. “How foolish to believe we are more powerful than the sea or the sky.”

— Ruta Sepetys

37. “War had bled color from everything, leaving nothing but a storm of gray.”

— Ruta Sepetys

38. “I wasn’t certain of anything anymore, except that New Orleans was a faithless friend and I wanted to leave her.”

— Ruta Sepetys

39. “He threw his burning cigarette onto our clean living room floor and ground it into the wood with his boot. We were about to become cigarettes.”

— Ruta Sepetys

40. “I shut the bathroom door and caught sight of my face in the mirror. I had no idea how quickly it was to change, to fade. If I had, I would have stared at my reflection, memorizing it. It was the last time I would look into a real mirror for more than a decade.”

— Ruta Sepetys

41. “Yet amidst all that, life has spit in the eye of death.”

— Ruta Sepetys

42. “I looked down at the little pink face in the bundle. A newborn. The child had been alive only minutes but was already considered a criminal by the Soviets.”

— Ruta Sepetys

43. “Was it harder to die, or harder to be the one who survived? I was sixteen, an orphan in Siberia, but I knew. It was the one thing I never questioned. I wanted to live.”

— Ruta Sepetys

44. “Can history disappear if it’s written in blood?”

— Ruta Sepetys

45. “New Orleans is unlike any city in America. Its cultural diversity is woven into the food, the music, the architecture – even the local superstitions. It’s a sensory experience on all levels and there’s a story lurking around every corner.”

— Ruta Sepetys

46. “I wanted to stay locked away from the pain and destruction. I didn’t want to be strong. I didn’t want to be the ‘smart girl’. I was so very tired. I just wanted it all to be over.”

— Ruta Sepetys

47. “My mother’s a prostitute. Not the filthy, streetwalking kind. She’s actually quite pretty, fairly well spoken, and has lovely clothes. But she sleeps with men for money or gifts, and according to the dictionary, that makes her a prostitute. She started working in 1940 when I was seven, the year we moved from Detroit to New Orleans.”

— Ruta Sepetys

48. “Just when you think this war has taken everything you loved, you meet someone and realize that somehow you still have more to give.”

— Ruta Sepetys

49. “Per aspera ad astra, Papa,′ I whispered. Through hardship to the stars.”

— Ruta Sepetys

50. “Enough studying, Joana. Sometimes living life is more instructive than studying it.”

— Ruta Sepetys