Top 120 William Kent Krueger Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “Sure this is hard work, but it’s good work because it’s a part of what connects us to this land, Buck. This beautiful, tender land.”

— William Kent Krueger

52. “Our former selves are never dead. We speak to them, arguing against decisions we know will bring only unhappiness, offering consolation and hope, even though they cannot hear.”

— William Kent Krueger

53. “They understand that if you repeat a lie often enough, eventually the public is going to accept it as truth.”

— William Kent Krueger

54. “I think we just keep going on. We keep doing what we always do and someday it’ll feel right again.”

— William Kent Krueger

55. “NOTHING IS EVER everything, but the loss of a true love feels that way. All-consuming. The blackest hole. The emptiest place in the universe.”

— William Kent Krueger

56. “But somewhere in the vault of our hearts, in a place our brains can’t or won’t touch, the worst is stored, and the only sure key to it is in our dreams.”

— William Kent Krueger

57. “The tale I’m going to tell is of a summer long ago. Of killing and kidnapping and children pursued by demons of a thousand names. There will be courage in this story and cowardice. There will be love and betrayal. And, of course, there will be hope. In the end, isn’t that what every good story is about?”

— William Kent Krueger

58. “They’re never far from us, you know.” “Who?” I asked. “The dead. No more’n a breath. You let that last one go and you’re with them again.”

— William Kent Krueger

59. “Haven’t you seen that part of me as well? A man’s many things. To isolate one part of him and judge him on that alone is to do him an injustice, don’t you think?”

— William Kent Krueger

60. “Why would I be angry? Because they believe a thing does not make it so. There is no dignity in anger. But I am also not a kicked dog.”

— William Kent Krueger

61. “Conscience was a devil that plagued the individual. Collectively, a people squashed it as easily as stepping on a daisy.”

— William Kent Krueger

62. “Everything that’s been done to us we carry forever.”

— William Kent Krueger

63. “There will be courage in this story and cowardice. There will be love and betrayal. And, of course, there will be hope. In the end, isn’t that what every good story is about?”

— William Kent Krueger

64. “I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.”

— William Kent Krueger

65. “It seems to me that when you look back at a life, yours or another’s, what you see is a path that weaves into and out of deep shadow. So much is lost. What we use to construct the past is what has remained in the open, a hodgepodge of fleeting glimpses. our histories, like my father’s current body, are structures built of toothpicks. So what I recall is a construct both of what stands in the light and what I imagine in the dark where I cannot see.”

— William Kent Krueger

66. “Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out.”

— William Kent Krueger

67. “She gave Mother Beal a look I couldn’t, at that age, interpret but I have since come to think of as profound maternal compassion, a strength emanating from a deep well of endurance that, across my life, I’ve come to understand was not particular to Sarah Schofield. I’ve witnessed it in other women who have suffered much without losing their hope or their gift for embracing with forgiveness those who are broken.”

— William Kent Krueger

68. “I’m a teacher of history in a high school in Saint Paul and what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.”

— William Kent Krueger

69. “I was little more than a child still wrapped in a soothing blanket of illusion.”

— William Kent Krueger

70. “When darkness comes over your soul, it doesn’t come in light shades; it descends with all the black of a moonless night.”

— William Kent Krueger

71. “The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or, hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.” “Those orchard trees were in pretty bad.”

— William Kent Krueger

72. “There is a deeper hurt than anything sustained by the body, and it’s the wounding of the soul. It’s the feeling that you’ve been abandoned by everyone, even God. It’s the most alone you’ll ever be. A wounded body heals itself, but there is a scar.”

— William Kent Krueger

73. “You are the light. The darkness will always try to snuff you out.”

— William Kent Krueger

74. “People who don’t know me well wonder that I’d give up my badge for an apron, thinking that flipping burgers is a big step down. If they asked me, which they don’t, I would tell them that when a man stumbles onto happiness, he’d be a fool to pass it by. It’s as simple as that. Sam’s Place makes me happy.”

— William Kent Krueger

75. “I loved the dark. The taste of what it offered sweet on the tongue of my imagination. The de licious burn of trespass on my conscience. I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.”

— William Kent Krueger

76. “God makes His presence known in many ways. In acts of love, in selfless acts of courage, in everyday human compassion.”

— William Kent Krueger

77. “I generally played a little fast and loose with my resources but I figured hell, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, especially in a stupid board game.”

— William Kent Krueger

78. “We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.”

— William Kent Krueger

79. “Me, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear.”

— William Kent Krueger

80. “And, Jake, there’s going to be lots in this world you’re going to feel bad about. Save your regret for the important things, okay?” Gus.”

— William Kent Krueger

81. “You don’t have to speak much if you speak well,” Meloux replied.”

— William Kent Krueger

82. “What comes, comes, why bark?”

— William Kent Krueger

83. “She kept secrets, her own and those told to her. I guess you’d call it integrity.”

— William Kent Krueger

84. “The dead. No more’n a breath. You let that last one go and you’re with them again.”

— William Kent Krueger

85. “Which turned out to be a thing I couldn’t do. Not because imagination failed me, but because I was afraid to dream in that way. In my whole life, I could recall no dream ever coming true.”

— William Kent Krueger

86. “Although I’d had no trouble looking at the casket the day before, on that Saturday I did my best to keep my eyes averted. I stared instead at the stained-glass window behind the altar and imagined shooting the panes out with a slingshot.”

— William Kent Krueger

87. “Funerals weren’t just about the dead. They were about the dead leaving this world to reside with God, someone Mother wasn’t seeing eye to eye with at the moment, if she ever had, and I couldn’t shake the concern that in the middle of the service she would spring from her pew and find some way to spite him.”

— William Kent Krueger

88. “Spirit and purpose in all things. For all creation, respect.”

— William Kent Krueger

89. “The sound of his deep sobs was enough to make a stone weep. It’s impossible to witness such open grief and not feel pity wrung from your heart... I couldn’t recall ever hearing a grown man cry this way. It made me think that no matter how big we grew or how old, there was always a child in us somewhere.”

— William Kent Krueger

90. “At the heart of most things that look bad is something that can be good and useful.”

— William Kent Krueger

91. “Oh the secrets of the night.”

— William Kent Krueger

92. “There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have. A day don’t go by that there’s not war somewhere in this world. A war to end all wars? That’s like saying a disease to end all diseases. Only way that’ll happen is when every human being on this earth is dead.”

— William Kent Krueger

93. “Love is the only river I know whose current flows both ways.”

— William Kent Krueger

94. “She hung up and the room was a fist of silence. page 233.”

— William Kent Krueger

95. “He knew there was no magic to wipe clean the slate of memory. You just learned how to move on.”

— William Kent Krueger

96. “Anger, hate, jealousy, envy, fear. Fill your pockets with these heavy stones and you spend your life trying not to drown. Throw them away and you float. The great current of life simply sweeps you up and carries you joyously to the place you were always meant to come to. Make no mistake, you will arrive there either way, through struggle or surrender. But one is the way of pain, the other of peace.”

— William Kent Krueger

97. “I believe no one belongs to anyone else. You, me, Waaboozoons, we are all dust borrowed for a little while from Grandmother Earth. And even that dust does not belong to her. She has borrowed it from all creation, which is the Great Mystery, whih is Kitchimanidoo. And if you ask this old man, I would say that another way to think about Kitchimanidoo is as a great gift. Kitchimanidoo is not about keeping. Nothing belongs to anyone. All of creation is meant as a giving. p. 269.”

— William Kent Krueger

98. “Since I first entered this world, what awaits has always been before me. If I turn this way or that, it is still there, waiting, more patient than any human being.”

— William Kent Krueger

99. “We entered a period in which every moment was weighted with both the absolute necessity of hope and a terrible and almost unbearable anticipation of the worst.”

— William Kent Krueger

100. “Like the beads of that bracelet, all things are connected. The past, the present, the future. One long, beautiful work from the hand of Kitchimanidoo. You, me, those who have gone before us, and those who come after, we are all connected in that creation. No one is ever truly lost to us.”

— William Kent Krueger