Top 40 Ryan Graudin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Chaos was inevitable. Might as well roll with it.”

— Ryan Graudin

2. “The wolves of war are gathering. They sing a song of rotten bones.”

— Ryan Graudin

3. “Yael was not a monster. Luka was not the next generation of National Socialism. They were what the Reich would come to fear the most. A Jewish Girl and a German boy holding the future and the past in their hands – together.”

— Ryan Graudin

4. “Monsters cut children open and call it progress. Monsters murder entire groups of people without blinking but get upset when they have to wash human ash from their garden strawberries. Monsters are the ones who watch other people do these things and do nothing to stop it.”

— Ryan Graudin

5. “There was still beauty in this world. And it was worth fighting for.”

— Ryan Graudin

6. “The braid is always stronger than the strand.”

— Ryan Graudin

7. “I’m tired of fixing things that always break.”

— Ryan Graudin

8. “Don’t let your heart get in the way of your head.”

— Ryan Graudin

9. “There are three rules of survival in the Walled City: Run fast. Trust no one. Always carry your knife.”

— Ryan Graudin

10. “Yael wanted to be like the Valkyrie maidens in the old Norse lore. Winged women who rode to war on the backs of wolves, choosing which soldiers lived and died. She’d thought she could death mean something, if she wielded it right.”

— Ryan Graudin

11. “Her self-reflection was no reflection at all. It was a shattered mirror. Something she had to piece together, over and over again. Memory by memory. Loss by loss. Wolf by wolf.”

— Ryan Graudin

12. “Cassiopeia? She was a queen long ago, in a different part of the world. The stories say she was very beautiful, but very proud. Too proud. She smack-talked some goddesses and got herself stuck up there for all eternity.”

— Ryan Graudin

13. “Once upon a different time, there was a girl who lived in a kingdom of death. Wolves howled up her arm. A whole pack of them – made of tattoo ink and pain, memory and loss. It was the only thing about her that ever stayed the same.”

— Ryan Graudin

14. “The world is wrong. I’m just doing my part to fix it.”

— Ryan Graudin

15. “Yael was a cobweb version, composed of gaps and strings and fragile nothings.”

— Ryan Graudin

16. “But their roots went deep, bound them together in a collective memory. With each new arrival, they pieced together more of their past, built more of their future.”

— Ryan Graudin

17. “If there was a fate worse than death, it was a life unremembered.”

— Ryan Graudin

18. “When humanity steps into the shoes of gods, things will go awry.”

— Ryan Graudin

19. “All these skills I’ve taught you – they’re burdens. Not gifts. Taking a life takes something from me. When you choose to kill, make sure it is for the right reasons. Make sure the decision is something you can live with.”

— Ryan Graudin

20. “Fear is not an excuse,” Yael told him. “Fear is being human.”

— Ryan Graudin

21. “It will take time to heal. Just like all the others.”

— Ryan Graudin

22. “Why, yes. I am a strange wonder. The most special of snowflakes! Born out of time, forever running to catch up to it!”

— Ryan Graudin

23. “Hope. A strange word. In her past, it had been a light, wispy thing. Crushed as easily as a finger under a guard’s boot. But now... now hope weighed so much, as if the Colosseum itself had collapsed on top of her. Mortar and suffering. Brick and time.”

— Ryan Graudin

24. “Pang, pang, dummkopf heart.”

— Ryan Graudin

25. “Are you you without your memories? If not, who do you become?”

— Ryan Graudin

26. “The moreness of him was beginning to show. The way ruins were excavated by an archaeologist. Brushstroke by brushstroke. Bit by bit.”

— Ryan Graudin

27. “It doesn’t matter that she’s holding those keys. None of them lets her outside.”

— Ryan Graudin

28. “The guard grabbed Yael’s hand, snapped his pen across her skin in two quick strikes. X marks the survivor.”

— Ryan Graudin

29. “The world is a large place and time is even larger.”

— Ryan Graudin

30. “Even at their most basic function, needles do two things: They give and they take away.”

— Ryan Graudin

31. “So she traced and she named. She hurt and she raged. She remembered.”

— Ryan Graudin

32. “People were more than crooked type and swastika-stamped documents. No number of bullet points and biography facts could pin the soul behind the eyes.”

— Ryan Graudin

33. “Kids with roofs and hot food have better things to do than play survival of the thuggiest.”

— Ryan Graudin

34. “He worshipped the past with a strange fervour. It was, he liked to tell her, the weight all mankind was born to bear. The roots we did not choose, but chose us.”

— Ryan Graudin

35. “I am Farway Gaius McCarthy, son of Empra McCarthy. Birth date unavailable. With timelessness in my blood and nowhere calling to my heart.”

— Ryan Graudin

36. “Her heart kept splitting inside her. Growing and breaking, rended and rendered, reminding her that she was so, so sick of death. All it carried. All it buried.”

— Ryan Graudin

37. “All secrets sound the same in the dark.”

— Ryan Graudin

38. “He did not make me. He did not break me.”

— Ryan Graudin

39. “He wanted to meet history face-to-face. He wanted to be the blood in its veins, as it was in his.”

— Ryan Graudin

40. “This is my world. Wide and open and waiting.”

— Ryan Graudin

41. “Now that I know, I can’t unsee her girlness. The turned curve of her nose, the slant of her cheeks. How her eyelashes curl up just so. It would be a mistake to think that any of these things mean she’s fragile. The very fact that she’s sitting here, eight days after being stabbed, is testament to that.”

— Ryan Graudin

42. “Time flies when you’re plundering history.”

— Ryan Graudin

43. “It never made sense to my young mind, how a hurt from so long ago could keep a man from walking right. Stay with him for the rest of his life. But now that I am older, now that I’ve fought my own wars and fired my own guns, I understand.”

— Ryan Graudin

44. “She’d been trained to survive many things: starvation and bullet wounds. Winter nights and scouring sun. Double-tied knots and interrogations at knifepoint. But this? A boy’s lips on hers. Moving and melding. Soft and strength, velvet and iron. Opposite elements that tugged and tor Yael from the inside. Feelings bloomed, hot and warm. Deep and dark.”

— Ryan Graudin

45. “There was an end. There is a beginning. They’re one and the same.”

— Ryan Graudin

46. “A different voice slid through the speakers now – his voice. The one that raised armies, toppled kingdoms. The one that sent the entire stadium into a hush. Even the raindrops hung back in the sky; the air cleared into a spitting drizzle.” p65.”

— Ryan Graudin

47. “Who do you love the most?” It seemed like a dangerous query, the way it was asked: razored syllables, hungry breath beating, beating against the black. “Myself.”

— Ryan Graudin

48. “But this... her... she’s more than warmth. She’s fire, a soul, a name. Mei Yee reverbs through my head, my veins. Lodges like shrapnel in the far reaches of my chest. More powerful than a pound of C-4. Uncontrollable.”

— Ryan Graudin

49. “Life’s short.” Ashes speckled the sand as Adele tapped her cigarette. “It’s getting shorter every day. I’m not going to waste mine fulfilling someone else’s idea of who I should be.”

— Ryan Graudin