Top 76 Kestrel Quotes
#1. She'd betrayed her country because she'd believed it was the right thing to do. Yet would she have done this, if not for Arin?
He knew none of it. Had never asked for it. Kestrel had made her own choices. It was unfair to blame him.
But she wanted to.
Marie Rutkoski
#2. My first lead role was a stage play called 'A Kestrel for a Knave'. I was 11.
Justin Chadwick
#3. Kestrel had bought a life, and loved it, and sold it.
Marie Rutkoski
#4. He led her to the dressing room, opened the wardrobe, and riffled through her clothes. He pulled out a black tunic, leggings, and jacket and thrust them at Kestrel.
Coolly she said, "This is a ceremonial fighting uniform. Do you expect me to fight a duel on the docks?
Marie Rutkoski
#5. Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn't.
Marie Rutkoski
#6. Peril thought her mother was dead. How would she react when she found out it was Kestrel - and she was still alive?
Tui T. Sutherland
#7. This is me figuring good behavior is for someone much younger.
Kestrel
Sarah Purdy Gilman
#8. Kestrel felt Arin's tension, the way he looked at the prince. Arin's worry was plain, his hands still at his sides yet slightly open, as if his friend might shatter and Arin needed to be ready to catch the pieces.
Marie Rutkoski
#9. She had done everything she could. And he didn't even know.
Marie Rutkoski
#10. She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin's voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?
The powder was so fine that she inhaled its sweetness, but always woke before she could taste.
Marie Rutkoski
#11. The world in which the kestrel moves, the world that it sees, is, and always will be, entirely beyond us. That there are such worlds all around us is an essential feature of our world.
Mary Midgley
#12. You don't, Kestrel, even though the god of lies loves you.
Marie Rutkoski
#13. In the morning, when Roshar saw their faces he rolled his eyes. "I want my tent back," he said. Kestrel laughed. *
Marie Rutkoski
#14. When she saw the opportunity to flee, she would take it. She would bring the hounds of the empire howling down on this city.
Marie Rutkoski
#15. Kestrel felt a slow, slight throb, a shimmer in the blood. She knew it well.
Her worst trait. Her best trait.
The desire to come out on top, to set her opponent under her thumb.
A streak of pride. Her mind ringed with hungry rows of foxlike teeth.
Marie Rutkoski
#16. Kestrel's cruel calculation appalled her. This was part of what had made her resist the military: the fact that she could make decisions like this, that she did have a mind for strategy, that people could be so easily become pieces in a game she was determined to win ...
Marie Rutkoski
#17. WHICH LEFT WAS THAT, USELESS?" Kestrel bellowed in his ear. "Are all MudWings this stupid? OR ARE YOU JUST DEAF?" Well, if you keep that up, I will be soon, Clay thought.
Tui T. Sutherland
#18. Bones must be silent like this, Kestrel thought, when they lay deep in the earth.
Marie Rutkoski
#19. Do you deny it? Grimani persisted.
Deny it? Only the greatest self-restraint prevents me from laughing it out of countenance.
Kate Ross
#20. Arin would trade his heart for a snarled knot of thread if it meant he would never have to see Kestrel again.
Marie Rutkoski
#22. Nothing is ever black and white, Nila. You should know that bu now. Its all how you survive the grey." -Kes
Pepper Winters
#23. Drink this," she told her friend.
Jess moaned.
"Do it," Kestrel said, "or you'll be sorry."
"What a lovely bedside manner you have," Sarsine said.
Marie Rutkoski
#24. Kestrel let the words echo in her mind. There had been a supple strength to his voice. An unconscious melody. Kestrel wondered if Arin knew how he exposed himself as a singer with every simple, ordinary word. She wondered if he meant to hold her in thrall.
Marie Rutkoski
#25. It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice.
Marie Rutkoski
#26. Kestrel lifted her gaze. As he met her eyes - an extremely light brown, the lightest shade before brown becomes gold - Arin knew that he was a fool. A thousand times a fool.
Marie Rutkoski
#27. All this guilt and shame and remorse you carry, Kestrel. Don't you see? That is what they burned you with. And you have added to it, all these years. The wall is of your own making. Take it down. Forgive yourself. Come out.
Robin Hobb
#28. Will you come with me?"
"Ah, Kestrel, that's something you never need to ask.
Marie Rutkoski
#30. I won't play you because even when I win, I lose. It's never been just a game between us.
Marie Rutkoski
#31. Gorgeous?" Ronan tried again. "Transcendent? Kestrel, the right adjective hasn't been invented to describe you.
Marie Rutkoski
#32. Sudden distrust slicked down Arin's spine.
Roshar raised his hand to quiet the roaring crowd, and Arin was reminded of Cheat relishing his role as an auctioneer. A stone rose in his throat. Kestrel's hand tightened on his, but Arin no longer felt wholly there.
Marie Rutkoski
#33. He said, "How can the inconsequence of your life not shame you?"
He said, "How do you not feel empty?"
I do, she thought as she pushed through the library doors and let them thud behind her. I do.
Marie Rutkoski
#34. She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. "I'm going to miss you when I wake up," she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream.
"Don't wake up," he said.
Marie Rutkoski
#35. Kestrel could read an expression as if looking through shifting water to see the grainy bottom, the silt rising or settling, the dart of a fish.
Marie Rutkoski
#36. She struggled not to show this. Already, that dream on the grass had faded in her memory. It was as if she'd worn it out by thinking too much about it. But in the moment, it had felt so real. Kestrel couldn't quite believe that it hadn't been.
Marie Rutkoski
#38. He hadn't love her. She hadn't loved him. Yet they'd cared for each other, and Kestrel remember how he'd set a soft black puppy into her hands. No one had given her such a gift. He'd made her laugh. That, too, was a gift.
Marie Rutkoski
#39. You snored," Kestrel said. "I did not." "You did. You snored so loudly that the people in my dreams complained.
Marie Rutkoski
#40. Kestrel raised one brow. How very surprising. Didn't you just make a promise and ask me to trust your word? Really, Arin. You must sort out your lies and your truths or even you won't know which is which.
Marie Rutkoski
#41. Yes, stop playing, Kestrel, she told herself. Clear the bets, clear the table. Walk away from the game. Now.
Marie Rutkoski
#43. Later, Kestrel wished she had spoken then, that no time had been lost. She wished that she'd had the courage that very moment to tell Arin what she'd finally known to be true: that she loved him with the whole of her heart.
Marie Rutkoski
#44. If you die, I'll die.' 'But is you live, I'll live.' - Bowman and Kestrel, Firesong
William Nicholson
#45. The guard hit Kestrel across the face. "I said, what did you give him?"
You had a warrior's heart, even then.
Kestrel spat blood. "Nothing," she told the guard. She thought of her father, she thought of Arin. She told her final lie. "I gave him nothing.
Marie Rutkoski
#46. He'd believed it. She couldn't believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.
Marie Rutkoski
#47. She focused on that nothingness, imagined it as ink spilling over everything she could possibly think or feel.
Marie Rutkoski
#48. She tried to imagine her former self. Enemy. Prisoner. Friend? Daughter. Spy. Prisoner again. "What am I now?"
Sarsine held both of Kestrel's hands. "What ever you want to be.
Marie Rutkoski
#49. Kestrel hadn't known until she saw her father's face how much she still loved him.
Wrong, that she felt this way. Wrong, that love could live with betrayal and hurt and anger.
Marie Rutkoski
#50. You might not think of me as your friend,' Kestrel told Arin, 'but I think of you as mine.
Marie Rutkoski
#52. No, it didn't hurt anymore to think about Kestrel. He'd been a fool, but he'd had to forgive himself for worse. Sister, father, mother. As for Kestrel ... Arin had some clarity on who he was: the sort of person who trusted too blindly, who put his heart where it didn't belong.
Marie Rutkoski
#53. Kestrel's laugh was white in the cold. "We could gamble for your coat."
"Ah, love, why don't we skip to the part where you win and I give it to you?
Marie Rutkoski
#54. He had sleepless eyes, his mouth a little swollen, the deeply tanned skin somehow burnished. Kestrel thought that she, too, must look like this: polished by desire, the way a river stone holds a luster from having been made so smooth.
Marie Rutkoski
#55. The general's daughter? We'd be fools not to. You talk about her as if she's made of spun glass. Know what I see? Steel.
Marie Rutkoski
#56. Kestrel could say that she'd learned that one's life is also the lives of others. A wrong is not an egg, separate unto itself and sealed. She could say that she understood the wrong in ignoring a wrong. She could say this, but the truth was that she should have learned it long before.
Marie Rutkoski
#57. He changed us both." She seemed to struggle for words. "I think of you, all that you lost, who you were, what you were forced to be, and might have been, and I - I have become this, this person, unable to - "
She shut her mouth.
"Kestrel," he said softly, "I love this person.
Marie Rutkoski
#58. Arin used to clutch his head in disgusted wonder at how fascinated he'd once been by the daughter of the Valorian general. He used to sting at her rejection. Now, though, the thought of Kestrel gave him a cold relief. Ice on a bruise.
Marie Rutkoski
#59. She would have stopped him. She would have wished herself deaf, blind, made of unfeeling smoke. She would have stopped his words out of terror, longing. The way terror and longing had become indistinguishable.
Marie Rutkoski
#60. How much easier everything would be if that were so. But Kestrel wouldn't let herself consider the truth. She didn't want to know its shape or see its face.
Marie Rutkoski
#61. A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.
Marie Rutkoski
#63. The reason you enjoy my company is because I look like how you feel.
Marie Rutkoski
#64. A kestrel can and does hover in the dead calm of summer days, when there is not the faintest breath of wind. He will, and does, hover in the still, soft atmosphere of early autumn, when the gossamer falls in showers, coming straight down as if it were raining silk.
Richard Jefferies
#65. She'd felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.
Marie Rutkoski
#66. 'Translations,' Lateran said scornfully, examining the bruises along Kestrel's ribs. 'Like caressing your lover through a burlap sack. You get the gesture of the thing, but not the nuance, and it is overall an irritating experience.'
L.S. Baird
#67. If I die, you'll survive. If you die, it will destroy me.
Marie Rutkoski
#68. Come closer, and I will tell you.
But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.
Marie Rutkoski
#69. Sometimes she heard her father's watch chime: a light sound, as light as a smile. It always soothed her music. When Kestrel played for him, the melody ran sweet, sheer, and strong.
Marie Rutkoski
#70. A lovely fatigue claimed him. He lay down on the grass and listened. He thought about how Kestrel had slept on the palace lawn and dreamed of him. When she had told him this, he'd wished that it had been real. He tried to imagine the dream, then found himself dreaming.
Marie Rutkoski
#71. A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.
Marie Rutkoski
#72. The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.
Marie Rutkoski
#74. Arin thought of Cheat, Tensen, Kestrel. He wondered if some part of him was drawn to lies. What was it that made him so easy to deceive?
Marie Rutkoski
#75. A singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn't her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers.
Kestrel looked away from Arin.
She swore to herself that she would never look back
Marie Rutkoski
#76. Arin. I've wanted to do this for a long time."
Her words silenced him, steadied him.
Antecipation lifted within her like the fragance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. "Ready?"
He smiled. "Play.
Marie Rutkoski
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