Hannah Kent > Quotes

“To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“I was worst to the one I loved best.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say “Agnes” and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Blíndur er bóklaus ma∂ur. Blind is a man without a book.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“I don't want to be remembered, I want to be here!”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“They see I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and believe a thinking woman cannot be trusted.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“The treachery of a friend is worse than that of a foe.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“She invented her own language to say what everyone else could only feel.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“I preferred to read than talk with the others.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Of all the names, one is a mistake. One is a nightmare. The stair you miss in the darkness.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“It was only later that I suffocated under the weight of his arguments, and his darker thoughts articulated. It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“How hidden the heart, Nance thought. How frightened we are of being known, and yet how desperately we long for it.”
― Hannah Kent, The Good People

“I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“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, Burial Rites

“I prefer a story to a prayer.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Θα χαθείς. Δεν υπάρχει τελευταία κατοικία, δεν υπάρχει κηδεία, δεν υπάρχει ταφή, μόνο ένα ασταμάτητο σκόρπισμα, ένα ταξίδι που σπάει σε χίλια άλλα άσκοπα, ένα ταξίδι που σε πάει παντού χωρίς να σου προσφέρει δρόμο για να γυρίσεις στο σπίτι, αφού δεν υπάρχει σπίτι, υπάρχει μόνο αυτό το κρύο νησί και ο σκοτεινός εαυτός σου ίσα που κρατιέται πάνω του, ώσπου ν' αρχίσεις κι εσύ να ουρλιάζεις σαν τον αέρα και να μιμείσαι τη μοναξιά του”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you, as though you are not there, it passes through you as though it does not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there...”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“Sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide.”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites

“What else is God good for other than a distraction from the mire we’re all stranded in?”
― Hannah Kent, Burial Rites