Top 200 Ruta Sepetys Quotes (2025 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. “They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light.”

— Ruta Sepetys

14. “History is the gateway to our collective story and the story of humanity. Historical fiction allows us to explore underrepresented stories and illuminate countries on the map.”

— Ruta Sepetys

15. “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

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

18. “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

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

22. “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

23. “Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean. Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land.”

— Ruta Sepetys

24. “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

25. “Yes, most are very happy. But they have no parents.” Sister exhales her annoyance. “It is better to have no parents than the wrong parents.”

— Ruta Sepetys

26. “In the universe of memories, we’re all the villain in someone’s story.”

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Ruta Sepetys

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

43. “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

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

— Ruta Sepetys

45. “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

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

— Ruta Sepetys

47. “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

48. “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

49. “Paradise: If communism is Paradise, why do we need barriers, walls, and laws to keep people from escaping?”

— Ruta Sepetys

50. “Good luck comes at a price. Bad luck is free.”

— Ruta Sepetys