Top 88 Hannah Kent Quotes

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

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #3644
#2. What's the name for the space between stars?"
"No such name."
"Make one up."
I thought about it. "The soul asylum."
"That's another way of saying heaven, Agnes.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #4055
#3. 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.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #13798
#4. Good Lord," he muttered "They pick a mouse to tame a cat.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #19009
#5. I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #33509
#6. They see I've got a head on my shoulders, and believe a thinking woman cannot be trusted.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #47800
#7. Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #48697
#8. I've been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #134445
#9. I still don't know why, exactly, but I do think people can have a spiritual connection to landscape, and I certainly did in Iceland.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #171344
#10. Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn't my own.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #180402
#11. I cannot think of what it was not to love him. To look at him and realise I had found what I had not known I was hungering for. A hunger so deep, so capable of driving me into the night, that it terrified me.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #182081
#12. It was not hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margret thought.As it says in the sagas, Opt er flago i fogru skinni. A witch often has fair skin.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #186290
#13. 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.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #204430
#14. Is love constant for you? Have you ever loved a woman? A person you love as much as you hate the hold they have on you?

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #328141
#15. I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #329032
#16. I don't want to be remembered, I want to be here!

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #342417
#17. Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #488086
#18. I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #488886
#19. But I needed to create a life of my own. And here I

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #490407
#20. Sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #529754
#21. I try to love God, Reverend. I do. But I cannot love these men. I ... I hate them.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #535850
#22. The next morning I woke, and for a few moments I didn't know where I was. Then my memory of the night came back to me, and anger tightened my stomach, invigorating me.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #543696
#23. Heavenly Father, forgive me my sins. Forgive me my weakness and fear. Help me to fight my cowardice. Strengthen my ability to withstand the sight of suffering, so that I might do Your work in relieving those who endure it. -Toti

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #544629
#24. The only thing I could think of was, if you move, you will crumble. If you breathe, you will collapse.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #564017
#25. You know you're going to have a good day when your morning begins with breakfast in the same room as Carrie Tiffany, David Vann and Lionel Shriver.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #590375
#26. What else is God good for other than a distraction from the mire we're all stranded in?

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #596189
#27. When I write, I write for myself, and I have high expectations ... so I'm just trying to meet those. I'm not going to distract myself with other people's expectations.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #611337
#28. Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #628144
#29. I have come upon the conviction that it is not the stern voice of a priest delivering the threat of brimstone, but the gentle and inquiring tones of a friend that will best draw back the curtain to her soul, District Commissioner.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #647591
#30. I don't like to pretend I was guided in any way by the supernatural world, but the more you talk about that, the easier it is to dismiss those notions.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #686082
#31. I might have starved to death. I would be mud-slick, stuffed to the guts with cold and hopelessness, and my body might know it was doomed and give up on its own. That would be better than idly winding wool on a snowy day, waiting for someone to kill me.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #775936
#32. Death happened, and in the usual way it happens, and yet, not like anything else at all.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #794766
#33. I had an interest in Scandinavian countries because I'd never seen snow.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #798056
#34. Most writers are drawn to what is unknown, rather than what is clear in any tale.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #803552
#35. The thunder kills the unhatched birds in their eggs.' 'Peg

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #806814
#36. My dad would tell me bedtime stories, and he used to always leave them open-ended and finish at a crucial point with the words, 'dream on'. Then it was my responsibility to finish the story as I was drifting off to sleep. We would call them dreaming stories.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #807775
#37. Those who are not being dragged to their deaths cannot understand how the heart grows hard and sharp, until it is a nest of rocks with only an empty egg in it.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #808224
#38. So lonely I make friends with the ravens that prey on lambs.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #811446
#39. I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It's written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #816024
#40. Folks say, for every mountain there is a valley.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #861653
#41. If I believed everything everyone had ever told me about my family I'd be a sight more miserable than I am now

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #893797
#42. I could flee to the heath. Show them that they cannot keep me locked up, that I am a thief of time and will steal the hours denied to me!

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #899779
#43. She doesn't look like a criminal, he thought. Not since she's had a bath.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #915776
#44. And though the snow smothered the valley and the milk froze in the dairy, my soul thawed.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #971267
#45. Some folks are forced to the edges by their difference. (...) But 'tis at the edges that they find their power.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #987159
#46. Of all the names, one is a mistake. One is a nightmare. The stair you miss in the darkness.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #991015
#47. How hidden the heart, Nance thought. How frightened we are of being known, and yet how desperately we long for it.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1030851
#48. He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide. Knew me like the smell of smoke, knew what I was, and what I wanted.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1049811
#49. The mystery at the center of 'Burial Rites' is not who killed whom on the night of March 13, 1828. It is the mystery each of us encounters: Can we every truly know another? Can we ever truly know ourselves?

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1058331
#50. I remain quiet. I am determined to close myself to the world, to tighten my heart and hold what has not yet been stolen from me. I cannot let myself slip away. I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1107109
#51. I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1108100
#52. There are times when I wonder whether I'm not already dead. This is no life; waiting in darkness, in silence, in a room so squalid I have forgotten the smell of fresh air. The

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1108842
#53. I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1150627
#54. 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.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1172458
#55. To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1218110
#56. I used to have 20/20 vision, believe it or not; that's gone because of all the reading I did when I wasn't supposed to, reading in the back of a car, waiting for each street light to go past so I could grab another sentence.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1219235
#57. I was worst to the one I loved best.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1248262
#58. 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.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1275729
#59. When did a smile ever get anyone into trouble?

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1277973
#60. Lauga had asked Margret whether she thought there would be an outward hint of the evil that drives a person to murder. Evidence oft he Devil: a herelip, a snaggletooth, a birthmark; some small outer defect. There must be a warning, some way of knowing, so that honest people could keep their guard.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1393502
#61. I preferred to read than talk with the others.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1469151
#62. She is not like me. She knows only the tree of life. She has not seen its twisted roots pawing stones and coffins.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1514771
#63. In Iceland, you can see the contours of the mountains wherever you go, and the swell of the hills, and always beyond that the horizon. And there's this strange thing: you're never sort of hidden; you always feel exposed in that landscape. But it makes it very beautiful as well.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1546069
#64. Natan Ketilsson fetched his wife from heaven's gate.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1548106
#65. I prefer a story to a prayer.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1549737
#66. If I had known that the dress I laboured over would be my only warmth in a room that reeked of sour skin. If I had known that the dress would one day be put on in the night, in a hurry, to be soaked with sweat as I ran through the witching hours to Stapar, screaming fit to raise the dead.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1564258
#67. He lay back down on the snow. "What's the name for the space between stars?" "No such name." "Make one up." I thought about it. "The soul asylum.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1573855
#68. We became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant,

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1576795
#69. No doves come from ravens' eggs

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1599611
#70. The treachery of a friend is worse than that of a foe.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1616887
#71. God has had His chance to free me, and for reasons known to Him alone, He has pinned me to ill fortune, and although I have struggled, I am run through and through with disaster; I am knifed to the hilt with fate.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1624993
#72. She made mistakes and others made up their minds about her. People around here don't let you forget your misdeeds. They think them the only things worth writing down.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1627528
#73. There are secrets at the heart of every story; there is something that must be uncovered or discovered, both by the reader and by the characters.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1649439
#74. The weight of his fingers on mine, like a bird landing on a branch. It was the drop of a match. I did not see that we were surrounded by tinder until I felt it burst into flames.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1650082
#75. I was a very imaginative child, and my parents were very encouraging of that. My sister and I would put on plays; I would write my own stories.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1665076
#76. She invented her own language to say what everyone else could only feel.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1671990
#77. The last bed, the last roof, the last floor. The last of everything brings lugs of pain, as though there will be nothing left, but smoke from fires abandoned.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1673880
#78. Agnes. Don't pretend you disagree. This is all there is and you know it. Life, here, in our veins. There is the snow, and the sky, and the stars and the things they tell us, and that's all.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1689717
#79. In the cowshed, my head hard against the floor, Natan broke the very yolk of my soul.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1760148
#80. I can picture the way he looked, and recall the weather, and the play of light across his stubbled face, but that virgin moment is impossible to recapture.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1779115
#81. People speak of the fear of the blank canvas as though it is a temporary hesitation, a trembling moment of self-doubt. For me it was more like being abducted from my bed by a clown, thrust into a circus arena with a wicker chair, and told to tame a pissed-off lion in front of an expectant crowd.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1785097
#82. I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1787357
#83. For the first time in my life, someone saw me, and I loved him because he made me feel I was enough.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1821621
#84. A tight fear, like a fishing line, hooked upon something that must, inevitably, be dragged from the depths. (Margret)

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1841949
#85. Criminals of this stature are usually sent abroad for their punishment, where there are jailhouses

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1861603
#86. It is the waiting that cripples.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1870529
#87. I really hate the term 'historical novel' - it reminds me of bodice-rippers. But I'm hooked on research, and I really, really enjoy it.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1876054
#88. Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone's bones.

Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent Quotes #1878057

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