Top 200 Ruta Sepetys Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

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

— Ruta Sepetys

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

— Ruta Sepetys

57. “My throat tightened. I swallowed, reminding myself she wasn’t really gone. I felt Mama among the trees. I could feel her touch and hear her laughter in the leaves. So I talked to the trees as I walked, hoping their branches would carry messages up to Mama and let her know what I had done, and most of all, that I would try to be brave.”

— Ruta Sepetys

58. “We cannot be too cautious, Hannelore. Just because someone knocks on the door doesn’t mean you have to open it. Sometimes, sweet girl, there are wolves at the door. If we are not careful, they might eat us.”

— Ruta Sepetys

59. “Silence has a voice of its own.”

— Ruta Sepetys

60. “The truck stopped in front of the hospital. Everyone seemed relieved that they would tend to the bald man’s injuries. But they did not. They were waiting. A woman who was also on the list was giving birth to a baby. As soon as the umbilical cord was cut, they would both be thrown into the truck.”

— Ruta Sepetys

61. “Every nation has hidden history, countless stories preserved only by those who experienced them. Stories of war are often read and discussed worldwide by readers whose nations stood on opposite sides during battle. History divided us, but through reading we can be united in story, study, and remembrance. Books join us together as a global reading community, but more important, a global human community striving to learn from the past.”

— Ruta Sepetys

62. “My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.”

— Ruta Sepetys

63. “You’re wrong. They steal our power by making us believe we don’t have any. They’re controlling us through our own fear.”

— Ruta Sepetys

64. “My war had been so long, my winter so cold. But i had made it home. And for the first time in a long time, i was not afraid.”

— Ruta Sepetys

65. “If I poured all the lies I had told into the Mississippi, the river would rise and flood the city.”

— Ruta Sepetys

66. “Books join us together as a global reading community, but more important, a global human community striving to learn from the past. What.”

— Ruta Sepetys

67. “Sometimes kindness can be delivered in a clumsy way. But it’s far more sincere in its clumsiness than those distinguished men you read about in books. Your father was very clumsy.”

— Ruta Sepetys

68. “Evil will rule until good men or women choose to act.”

— Ruta Sepetys

69. “What did I want? I wanted the war to be over so I could ask her out.”

— Ruta Sepetys

70. “Those memories, they are the coals that shield my heart from frost.”

— Ruta Sepetys

71. “There’s a saying, ‘Death hath a thousand doors to let out life; I shall find one.’ But the children. That’s what I struggle with.′ He shook his head. ‘Why the children?”

— Ruta Sepetys

72. “You love stories, Emilia. Well, the trees hold hundreds of years of stories. Think of it, everything these trees have seen and felt. All of the secrets are inside of them.”

— Ruta Sepetys

73. “Valencia. City by the sea, birthplace of her favorite painter, Sorolla. Hotel guests speak of Valencia’s tranquil beauty, fragrant orange trees, and rolling blue waters. What does a large body of water sound and smell like? Ana wonders. Landlocked, fenced by circumstance, she has never seen the sea. She sees Spain only through images on postcards that guests collect in their rooms. If she transfers to the hotel business office, perhaps one day she too will walk along the beach in Valencia.”

— Ruta Sepetys

74. “We all laced together – a brothel madam, an English professor, a mute cook, a quadroon cabbie, and me, the girl carrying a bucket of lies and throwing them like confetti.”

— Ruta Sepetys

75. “Through my own struggles I’ve learned that knowing is something that evolves. What we think we know can be quite far from the truth.”

— Ruta Sepetys

76. “I didn’t need his criticism. I carried enough guilt on my own. I had done everything wrong. I had the highest marks in school but couldn’t master common sense.”

— Ruta Sepetys

77. “As the saying goes, better to die standing than live kneeling.”

— Ruta Sepetys

78. “She is you, she is your mother, your father, your country. She is Poland.”

— Ruta Sepetys

79. “The State controls the amount of food we eat, our electricity, our transportation, the information we receive. But with philosophy, we control our own minds. What if the internal landscape was ours to build and paint?”

— Ruta Sepetys

80. “War had rearranged my priorities. I now clung to memories more than goals or material things. But there were a few irreplaceable items that buoyed my spirit and fight for life. It was at that moment that I realized. Something was missing from my suitcase.”

— Ruta Sepetys

81. “I thought of Munch as I sketched, his theory that pain, love, and despair were links in an endless chain.”

— Ruta Sepetys

82. “Willie said normal was boring and that I should be grateful that I had a touch of spice. She said no one cared about boring people, and when they died, they were forgotten, like something that slips behind the dresser.”

— Ruta Sepetys

83. “We the survivors are not the true witnesses. The true witnesses, those in possession of the unspeakable truth, are the drowned, the dead, the disappeared. – Primo Levi.”

— Ruta Sepetys

84. “Some friendships are born of commonality. Others of proximity. And some friendships, often the unlikely ones, are born of survival. Rafa and his friend are comrades of hardship. They refuse to speak of the boys’ home in Barcelona. It was not a “home.” It was a hellhole, a slaughterhouse of souls. The “brothers” and “matrons” who ran the institution took pleasure in the humiliation of children. The mere memory is poison.”

— Ruta Sepetys

85. “My arm began moving, turning the invisible crank of Death’s music box. Somewhere inside, I didn’t want the melody to end.”

— Ruta Sepetys

86. “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.”

— Ruta Sepetys

87. “They were happy to help someone, to succeed at something, even if they weren’t to benefit. 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

88. “The soldier stared at Ingrid. His silence was elastic, slowly curling a rope around her neck.”

— Ruta Sepetys

89. “You like me, Josie Moraine. You just don’t know it yet.”

— Ruta Sepetys

90. “I clung to books and words because, unlike people, they’d never abandon me.”

— Ruta Sepetys

91. “Somehow I had to turn the salted peanuts in the cigar box into petits fours.”

— Ruta Sepetys

92. “He doesn’t carry the disease of fear.” “It’s easy to be fearless when you have nothing to lose,” says Julia.”

— Ruta Sepetys

93. “His smugness was annoying. This was the type of man who looked at a picture on the wall and instead of admiring the photo, looked at his own reflection in the glass.”

— Ruta Sepetys

94. “A wrongdoing doesn’t give you the right to do wrong. You know that.”

— Ruta Sepetys

95. “But unlike Mama, I would not go to heaven. My secrets padlocked the gates. I’d be a torn kite stuck in the dead branches of a tree, unable to fly.”

— Ruta Sepetys

96. “The old man nodded. “There’s a saying, ‘Death hath a thousand doors to let out life; I shall find one.’ We all have a door that waits. I know that. I accept it. But the children. That’s what I struggle with.”

— Ruta Sepetys

97. “When the survivors are gone we must not let the truth disappear with them. Please, give them a voice.”

— Ruta Sepetys

98. “Death, it seems, has a mind of its own.”

— Ruta Sepetys

99. “Hope, like oxygen, is what kept her going.”

— Ruta Sepetys

100. “Tragedy was a big social event, and everyone wanted in on it.”

— Ruta Sepetys