Top 88 Hannah Kent Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#4. Natan Ketilsson fetched his wife from heaven's gate.
Hannah Kent
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I preferred to read than talk with the others.
Hannah Kent
#8. 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
#9. When did a smile ever get anyone into trouble?
Hannah Kent
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.
Hannah Kent
#14. 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
#15. I first heard the story of Agnes Magnusdottir when I was an exchange student in the north of Iceland.
Hannah Kent
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. How hidden the heart, Nance thought. How frightened we are of being known, and yet how desperately we long for it.
Hannah Kent
#22. Of all the names, one is a mistake. One is a nightmare. The stair you miss in the darkness.
Hannah Kent
#23. 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
#24. Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone's bones.
Hannah Kent
#25. 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
#27. Criminals of this stature are usually sent abroad for their punishment, where there are jailhouses
Hannah Kent
#28. A tight fear, like a fishing line, hooked upon something that must, inevitably, be dragged from the depths. (Margret)
Hannah Kent
#29. For the first time in my life, someone saw me, and I loved him because he made me feel I was enough.
Hannah Kent
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. In the cowshed, my head hard against the floor, Natan broke the very yolk of my soul.
Hannah Kent
#34. Some folks are forced to the edges by their difference. (...) But 'tis at the edges that they find their power.
Hannah Kent
#35. 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
#36. She invented her own language to say what everyone else could only feel.
Hannah Kent
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The treachery of a friend is worse than that of a foe.
Hannah Kent
#44. We became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant,
Hannah Kent
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. I try to love God, Reverend. I do. But I cannot love these men. I ... I hate them.
Hannah Kent
#48. Sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me.
Hannah Kent
#49. But I needed to create a life of my own. And here I
Hannah Kent
#50. 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
#51. Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness.
Hannah Kent
#52. I don't want to be remembered, I want to be here!
Hannah Kent
#53. I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them.
Hannah Kent
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn't my own.
Hannah Kent
#59. 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
#60. I've been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow.
Hannah Kent
#61. 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
#62. They see I've got a head on my shoulders, and believe a thinking woman cannot be trusted.
Hannah Kent
#63. 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
#64. Good Lord," he muttered "They pick a mouse to tame a cat.
Hannah Kent
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Most writers are drawn to what is unknown, rather than what is clear in any tale.
Hannah Kent
#68. And though the snow smothered the valley and the milk froze in the dairy, my soul thawed.
Hannah Kent
#69. She doesn't look like a criminal, he thought. Not since she's had a bath.
Hannah Kent
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Folks say, for every mountain there is a valley.
Hannah Kent
#73. 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
#74. So lonely I make friends with the ravens that prey on lambs.
Hannah Kent
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. The thunder kills the unhatched birds in their eggs.' 'Peg
Hannah Kent
#78. The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.
Hannah Kent
#79. I had an interest in Scandinavian countries because I'd never seen snow.
Hannah Kent
#80. Death happened, and in the usual way it happens, and yet, not like anything else at all.
Hannah Kent
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. What else is God good for other than a distraction from the mire we're all stranded in?
Hannah Kent
#87. 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
#88. The only thing I could think of was, if you move, you will crumble. If you breathe, you will collapse.
Hannah Kent
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
