Ruta Sepetys Quotes

“Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.”

“Part of me felt guilty. Was it selfish that I wanted to live, even though my parents were gone?”

“I don’t deserve anything. You stand for what is right, Lina, without the expectation of gratitude or reward.”

“My point is that we’re dealing with two devils who both want to rule hell.”

″‘Hide them. Keep them safe for me,’ I said, putting my hands on top of his. ‘I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t want them to be destroyed. There’s so much of me, of all of us, in these drawings.‘”

“I planted a seed of hatred in my heart. I swore it would grow to be a massive tree whose roots would strangle them all.”

“How could Stalin simply take something that didn’t belong to him, something that a farmer and his family had worked their whole lives for?”

“He threw his burning cigarette onto our clean living room floor and ground it into the wood with his boot. We were about to become cigarettes.”

“I shut the bathroom door and caught sight of my face in the mirror. I had no idea how quickly it was to change, to fade. If I had, I would have stared at my reflection, memorizing it. It was the last time I would look into a real mirror for more than a decade.”

“Joana still had her mother. Reuniting with her mother was her motivation. She would slay dragons to get to her. Mother was anchor. Mother was comfort. Mother was home. A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean.”

“I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.”

“Guilt is a hunter. My conscience mocked me, picking fights like a petulant child. It’s all your fault, the voice whispered.”

“I had agreed with Mother to look to the future, but secretly I dreamed of returning to the past.”

″‘No, son,’ pleaded my father. ‘Not a traitor to your country. Much worse. A traitor to your soul.‘”

“I scanned the group. Faces spoke to their future. I saw courage, anger, fear and confusion. Others were hopeless. They had already given up.”

“Pardon me? Is that really what she said? These men burst into our home at night, slam her into the mirror-and she asks them to pardon her?”

″‘Our sense of humor,’ said Mother, her eyes pooled with laughing tears. ‘They can’t take that away from us, right?’”

“I was sick of it. Sick of hearing the phrase German Only. Could we really turn our backs on innocent homeless children? They were victims, not soldiers.”

“But, Eva, dear, your shoes are carrying your most valuable possession-your life.”

“I moved from body to body, treating blisters, wounds, frostbite. But I had no treatment for what plagued people most the most. Fear.”

“All the running, the hiding, the lies, the killing, for what? The endless circle of revenge: answering pain by inflicting pain. Why did I do it?”

“I closed my eyes and tried to think of something, anything, to calm myself. I pictured my sketchbook. I felt my hands stir. Images, like celluloid frames, rolled through my mind.”

“Fear is a hunter. But brave warriors, we brush away fear with a flick of the wrist. We laugh in the face of fear, kick it like a stone across the street.”

“Joana Vilkas, your daughter, your sister. She is salt to the sea.”

“The child let out a soft cry and its tiny fists pummeled the air. Its fight for life had begun.”

“Survival had its price: guilt.”

“My body begged for sleep but my mind warned me not to trust these people.”

“What a group we were. A pregnant girl in love, a kindly shoemaker, an orphan boy, a blind girl, and a giantess who complained that everyone was in her way when she herself took up the most room. And me, a lonely girl who missed her family and begged for a second chance.”

“Joana’s freedom had cost me mine.”

″‘Do you understand?’ My father looked at Andrius, hesitant. ‘You can help me find you,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll know it’s you…just like you know Munch. But you must be very careful.‘”

“Mother was starving herself to feed us.”

“Foolish woman. Don’t you realize this is just the beginning? We have the chance now to die with dignity.”

“It could have been so easy. I could have walked across the ice myself, without the burden of the group. They could have tried to save the blind girl. Maybe they all would have drowned in the process. That would have been so much easier. And so much harder.”

“I clung to my rusted dreams during the times of silence. It was at gunpoint that I fell into every hope and allowed myself to wish from the deepest part of my heart. Komorov thought he was torturing us. But we were escaping into a stillness within ourselves. We found strength here.”

“It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell someone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself.”

“Everything was filthy. Especially my conscience.”

“What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?”

“I thought of the countless refugees trekking toward freedom. How many millions of people had lost their home and family during the war?”

“The Nazis couldn’t stop the wind and the snow. The Russians couldn’t take the sun or the stars.”

“I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”