Top 150 William Kent Krueger Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The head and the heart, you know, they don’t always see eye to eye.”

— William Kent Krueger

102. “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

103. “I know love. So if it’s true, like Sister Eve says, that God is love, then I guess I believe.”

— William Kent Krueger

104. “I don’t know why a government would behave any differently from the people who comprise it,” Mother Beal said around the stem of her pipe. “When it comes to money, people often behave in ungracious and ungrateful ways.”

— William Kent Krueger

105. “Every life lived fully is going to have some regrets, because every risk is not worth taking, but you don’t always see that in time. Or if you do, you convince yourself that you’ll be the one to beat the odds.”

— William Kent Krueger

106. “In this moment, here and now, we celebrate the spirit of what is good in each of us and in those friends who stood with us in the dark and chased away death’s shadow.” He lifted his eyes to the night sky. “We give thanks to the Creator and we pray that in the battle between love and fear, which is always raging in the human heart, love will triumph.”

— William Kent Krueger

107. “You will share the same fire. You will hang your garments together. You will help one another. You will walk the same trail. You will look after one another. Be kind to one another. Be kind to your children.”

— William Kent Krueger

108. “There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have.”

— William Kent Krueger

109. “I don’t mind dying; I just don’t want you to die.”

— William Kent Krueger

110. “The air was still, like a held breath.”

— William Kent Krueger

111. “Every heart wants to find peace. In the end, that is the place the Creator takes us.”

— William Kent Krueger

112. “The daytime. The nighttime. Eating. Just lying here thinking. Nothing feels right. I keep waiting for her to come up the stairs and poke her head into our room and, you know, goof around with us.” “I know what you mean,” I said. “What do we do, Frank?” “I think we just keep going on. We keep doing what we always do and someday it’ll feel right again.” “Will it? Really?” “Yeah, I think so.”

— William Kent Krueger

113. “It was a feeling that should have been familiar to us by then, but does anyone ever get used to having their heart broken?”

— William Kent Krueger

114. “Life’s stranger and more beautiful than I ever thought possible.”

— William Kent Krueger

115. “I lay in the dark thinking about the bitterness inside the pig scarer and the sadness that was there, too, and I figured they were probably twins joined at the hip.”

— William Kent Krueger

116. “I was born along with the sun and earth and moon and planets and all the stars. Every atom of my being was there at the very beginning.”

— William Kent Krueger

117. “Vox populi,” Belle says. “The voice of the people.”

— William Kent Krueger

118. “Charlie, you and I both know that justice isn’t always about what the law dictates. Hell, maybe it never is.”

— William Kent Krueger

119. “I could see him rolling the question around in his head. I don’t know about the God in the Bible, he signed. But I know you and Albert and Emmy, and now Sister Eve. And I think about Herman Volz and Emmy’s mother. I know love. So if it’s true, like Sister Eve says, that God is love, then I guess I believe.”

— William Kent Krueger

120. “Good luck, Cork thought. In Aurora, a Lincoln Town Car would be as inconspicuous as a nun in a G-string.”

— William Kent Krueger

121. “The most frightening thing we do in our lives is to love.”

— William Kent Krueger

122. “1. The world is hard. Be strong. 2. Love is for only a few. Don’t expect it. 3. Life isn’t fair. But some people are. Be one of them.”

— William Kent Krueger

123. “When you saved that girl, I told you that you’d received a gift. The gift is like this star at the center of the cottonwood. It’s inside you now. Someday, when you need it, it will come out, like the stars when the wind shakes the cottonwood trees, and it will shine for you, well and truly.” The boy.”

— William Kent Krueger

124. “I’ve come four decades since but I’m not sure that even now I fully understand. I still spend a lot of time thinking about the events of that summer. About the terrible price of wisdom. The awful grace of God.”

— William Kent Krueger

125. “You are two minds, two hearts, two souls. But this day you begin a journey of one. Where it will lead, I cannot tell you. Only the Creator knows. But I can tell you this. On your journey, you will never be alone. In the cold, you will have another body for warmth. In times of uncertainty, you will have a hand to hold for comfort. In the dark, you will have the whisper of love to assure you that the light will return.”

— William Kent Krueger

126. “And there it was again, the magic of music.”

— William Kent Krueger

127. “I comfort myself with something Henry once told me. He said we all stumble in the dark, but that’s why the Great Mystery gave us voices, so that we can call out, seeking others in the dark. And we were given hands so that we can reach out to help one another. Alone, the darkness swallows us. But together, we help each other through. So, when things seem bleakest, I tell myself to soldier on. I try to remind myself to call out. I do my best to be ready to offer a hand.”

— William Kent Krueger

128. “Bobby had a gift and the gift was his simplicity. The world for Bobby Cole was a place he accepted without needing to understand it. Me, I was growing up scrambling for meaning and I was full of confusion and fear.”

— William Kent Krueger

129. “This was during the period my mother was enamored of the work of Ayn Rand and had decided she too could be a world-famous author.”

— William Kent Krueger

130. “The United States has a homicide rate three times that of Canada; two-thirds of those homicides are committed with firearms. A child in the United States is twelve times more likely to die of a firearm injury than a child in Canada. I could go on. The evidence in support of Canada’s attitude and legislative action is so convincing only an idiot wouldn’t get it.”

— William Kent Krueger

131. “The day was hot and windless and the sky a hard china blue and I lay alone on the railroad bridge and cried my heart out above a river that seemed to have none.”

— William Kent Krueger

132. “Heavenly Father, for the blessings of this food and these friends and our families, we thank you. In Jesus’s name, amen.” That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.”

— William Kent Krueger

133. “He held happiness in his hand easy as if he’d just, I don’t know, plucked a blade of grass from the ground. page 24.”

— William Kent Krueger

134. “Memories sing to us, he told me. They’re birds whose songs never fade.”

— William Kent Krueger

135. “We all die, but some of us – those who are blessed or maybe just lucky – have the opportunity before that end to be redeemed. We can let go, forgive others, and also forgive ourselves for the worst of what we are or have been.”

— William Kent Krueger

136. “It had come from the mouth of a boy who never in his entire life had said three words in public without stumbling in the most horrible ways imaginable. With Mother home I liked the idea that we’d been saved as a family by the miracle of that ordinary grace.”

— William Kent Krueger

137. “Worry and you open the door to the worst of possibilities, Niece. Better, I think, to hope. The heart invites a friendlier spirit for its company.”

— William Kent Krueger

138. “There is something about a fire on a dark night, a fire shared with others, that pulls the gloom right out of you. We sat around the cheery little blaze with the branches popping as they burned with the flames dancing, and although we hadn’t eaten that day, I could feel our spirits rise along with the smoke that drifted toward the stars.”

— William Kent Krueger

139. “Even after the sun had set and the sky had gone from bruised purple to an indigo full of stars, they talked. There beside the silent flow of the Alabaster River, they split open the darkness inside both of them in which too many secrets had lain hidden.”

— William Kent Krueger

140. “When Emil returned from the Second World War blind and disfigured and wanting only to feed in isolation on the meat of his bitterness, his family had purchased and completely renovated a farmhouse that was a stone’s throw from the edge of town. page 63.”

— William Kent Krueger

141. “Whenever hope packed its bag and left for good, all that remained was a terrible emptiness, immeasurably sad.”

— William Kent Krueger

142. “In the end, a soldier kills because all the circumstances of a moment drive him to it. It isn’t for freedom or God or for the people back home. It’s because he has no choice but to kill. And in that moment, he’s not thinking of it as a good thing or a bad thing. He’s not thinking about ethics. He’s thinking about keeping himself alive and keeping his comrades alive. And in all that mess, the only thing he wants is for it to end and for him to be alive to see that end.”

— William Kent Krueger

143. “You know how big the human heart is?” Graff balled his hand into a fist. “About that size. I continue to be amazed at how much hate such a small thing can hold, even in people who think of themselves as decent and Christian.”

— William Kent Krueger

144. “There had been a time, a very long time, when there’d been no humans on this land, and Graff believed that someday it would be that way again. All that men had done to prove their ownership, their mastery, would be undone. In time as it was reckoned by humans, this might be a long while coming, but it would come, In the reckoning of the earth, it would take place in less than a heartbeat.”

— William Kent Krueger

145. “People who make other people unhappy are generally pretty unhappy themselves,” she said. He gave a small nod of agreement, then turned to her. “What about people who make other people happy? That’s you, Angie.” “Well, I’m glad you think so.” “Why?” he asked. “Why am I glad?” “No, why are you so happy?” “Maybe it’s because I know how blessed I am.” “That must be something,” he said.”

— William Kent Krueger

146. “Smells are the time machines of human perception. A scent can take you instantly back to a particular place and time.”

— William Kent Krueger

147. “Loss, once it’s become a certainty, is like a rock you hold in your hand. It has weight and dimension and texture.”

— William Kent Krueger

148. “White men get drunk. White men break the law. And nobody says it’s because they’re white. But an Indian does the same thing and the first reason people come up with is that he’s Indian.”

— William Kent Krueger

149. “There is no hell, Little Rabbit,” Meloux offered. “Except what we create for ourselves here or others create for us. Better that this man’s spirit has moved on.”

— William Kent Krueger

150. “When she sang she could make people laugh or dance or fall in love or go to war.”

— William Kent Krueger