Hannah Kent Quotes

Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness.

A bubble of fear passes up my spine. It's the feeling of standing on ice and suddenly hearing it crack under your weight - both thrilling and terrifying together.

The treachery of a friend is worse than that of a foe.

If I believed everything everyone had ever told me about my family I'd be a sight more miserable than I am now

To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.

As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.

I don't want to be remembered, I want to be here!

I preferred to read than talk with the others.

So lonely I make friends with the ravens that prey on lambs.

No doves come from ravens’ eggs

When did a smile ever get anyone into trouble?

I've been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow.

The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.

It’s not fair. People claim to know you through the things you’ve done, and not by sitting down and listening to you speak for yourself.

I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland.

Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone's bones.

I prefer a story to a prayer.

Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones.

Believe me, Nóra. An old broom knows the dirty corners best

Poverty scrapes these homes down until they all look the same, and they all have in common the absence of things that ought to be there. I might as well have been at one place all my life.

Some folks are forced to the edges by their difference. (...) But 'tis at the edges that they find their power.