Kate Quinn Quotes

Kate Quinn

Kate Quinn is an American writer, known for her works of historical fiction. (Kate Quinn Quotes)

“A bad man can be a good carpenter or a good hatmaker or a good lover. The skill has nothing to do with the soul.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“A gentleman never pushed things past a certain point with a girl unless there was some kind of understanding that things would soon be made permanent.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“A girl couldn’t let herself be carried away in the heat of the moment – that was for men, who had nothing to lose.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“A nightmare was a needle plunging through the net of human memory; it slipped past one strand and caught up another on its point, stitching up dark dreams out of the unlikeliest recollections.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“And when Venutius was not busy fighting, he was content to spend his days hammering things near a forge and his evenings hammering, well… as I said, we got on well.”
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“Anyone can be fodder for machine guns, but only a few can break top-level ciphers. This war needs your skull intact. Let someone else get blown up – better them than you.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, Beth had read in Vanity Fair only that morning, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Be patient, and tough, he’d said with his gentle expression. Someday this pain will be useful to you.”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“Because I sensed in him the magic of a poet, a storyteller who can bind you with tales of things that had never been and could never be. And I felt myself so bound. Pulled under. At a loss for breath in his presence, just as I once was in a river, clinging to life.”
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“Because we can keep on. Others, they try keeping on, they just…” she mimed an explosion. “It’s too much for them. They come to pieces. Not us. Hunters, they are different. We can’t stop. Not for bad sleep or parachute dreams or people who say we should want peace and babies instead. It’s a world full of mad wolves, and we hunt them till we die.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“Better the slave of a bad master, I’m told, than king of the dead.”
Kate Quinn
A Song of War

“Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Building a generation is like building a wall—one good well-made brick at a time, one good well-made child at a time. Enough good bricks, you have a good wall. Enough good children, you have a generation that won’t start a world-enveloping war.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“But I’d far rather live without souls or morals than Parmesan.”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“But if men are the makers and breakers of empires, then women are the makers and breakers of men.”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“Cambridge is lovelier than Oxford. Don’t let any of the Oxford blokes tell you different.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Canada was beautiful, but England was home. Better to be bombed at home among friends than be safe and corroding in exile.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Dilly Knox was one of the Park’s eccentric geniuses, notorious for his absentmindedness, his Alice-in-Wonderland approach to codebreaking, and his habit of recruiting only women for his team.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Do not borrow fear before its time’ ~ Titus”
Kate Quinn
The Three Fates

“Empresses,” Vix said in disgust. “They’re always trouble, the tricky bitches. Emperors might forgive you if you cross them, but never empresses.”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“Even if we lose, what of it? We have made a song of freedom that will ring for a thousand years. No one will forget the Iceni or their red-haired queen.”
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“Even now he could not say in his heart of hearts for which side he would draw his blade when he was finally called upon. What was a child of two worlds to do?” (Kate Quinn Quotes)
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“Even when she was just a flutter inside me, I loved her. Because she is ours.”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“Flamingo necks, peacock brains, pike livers, lark tongues, sow’s udders, elephant trunks and ears extravagantly frilled with parsley.”
Kate Quinn
Daughters of Rome

“Goodness,” Marcella said at last. “I know you’d do anything to avoid Tullia’s dinner party, but suicide seems a little extreme.”
Kate Quinn
Daughters of Rome

“Grief was beginning to be overlaid by the first layer of skin and time. Jordan supposed that layer would get thicker and thicker and in a way she was sorry. Grief cut, but it also made you remember.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“Hatred doesn’t lie. Hatred doesn’t tell soothing stories. You’ll tell me true.’ ~ Hadrian”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“Have you ever been – well, i mean, have you ever – really wanted someone ? Wanted them like water in the desert – even when you knew all their faults, every single one – and it didnt matter ?”
Kate Quinn
Mistress of Rome

“He doesn’t need to tend her, because she hunts her own prey. He doesn’t need to shield her, because she kills her own enemies. He doesn’t need to look for her, because she’s always at his side.”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“How could you hope to build anything with a man, when so many of the things you had to tell him were lies?”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“How would I be remembered by them, or would I be remembered at al? For memories were soon all that was to be left of me. And the sole, final hope I had was that somehow the memory of would matter – to my friends, to my lovers, to my country.”
Kate Quinn
Ribbons of Scarlet

“I always eat when I defraud convents”
Kate Quinn
The Lion and the Rose

“I am patriotic enough to commit treason in my country’s best interests. Grow up. Countries are high, shining ideals, but governments are made of selfish, greedy men. Can you honestly say our fellows at the top always know what they’re doing?”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“I believe in my stars. I’ll make them go where I want.”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“I believe in revenge… I’ve lost faith in much over the years, but not that.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“I can break anything. Give me a pencil and a crib, and I’ll crack the world.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“I crack messages. I don’t interpret them. It doesn’t matter to me what I’m breaking. Why complicate things when there aren’t hardly enough hours in the day as is?”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“I don’t mind men who are shorter than me. I mind men who are touchy about being shorter than me.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“I gripped her, drowning, and I loved her more than anything on this wide green earth.”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“I love you. I love the way you rub the scar on the back of your hand when you’re nervous. I love the way you make a sword into a living part of your body. I love the way you burn your eyes into me, as if you’re seeing me fresh every time. I love the black streak in you that wants to kill the world, and the soft streak that is sorry afterward. I love the way you laugh, as if you’re surprised that you can laugh at all. I love the way you kiss my breath away. I love the way you breathe and speak and smile. I love the way you take the air out of my lungs when you hold me. I love the way you make a dance out of death. I love the confusion I see in your eyes when you realize you are happy. I love every muscle and bone in your body, every twist and bend in your soul.”
Kate Quinn
Mistress of Rome

“I undertake to be burnt by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten by rods, and to die by the sword.”
Kate Quinn
Mistress of Rome

“I will not tell you one single solitary fact about my work, my friends, or the woman I was arested with. But I will tell you this, Rene Bordelon. You’re a gullible fool. You’re a terribly lover. And I hate Baudelaire.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“I wish the war would get going. This waiting … we know they’re going to come at us. Part of me wishes they’d just do it. The sooner it’s begun, the sooner it’s over.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“I’m a man of Rome, with all that entails—a citizen, a soldier, a paterfamilias—and all men of Rome think they stride the earth and make it tremble. We make the laws and then punish the lawless; we make the borders and then punish the border-breakers; we record our own glory and then demand our names be remembered—all over the Empire we stride and we bellow, we make and we break. But if men are the makers and breakers of empires, then women are the makers and breakers of men.”
Kate Quinn
The Three Fates

“If any be angry, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“If he doesn’t love me in a boiler suit, he’s not worth dressing up for in the first place.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“If one has the luxury of sleeping safe in the night to come, one should always have more brandy.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“If part of that heart was always out of reach, that seemed entirely fair to Ian. You did not get a whole heart when you pinned yours to a splendid, battered, high-flying hawk like a nightwhich. Nina’s soul would always, in some deep place, yearn to be flying under a bomber’s moon with her dark-eyed Moscow rose.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“If you don’t know what lies ahead, make a good dramatic entrance and hope for the best.”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“If you were a man and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it satire. If you were a woman and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it fluff.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“In a war, you save who you can. Whenever you can.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“It doesn’t matter if you’re fighting a war with swords, with bombers, or with sticks and stones – weapons are no good unless you know when and where to aim them.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“It doesn’t do to look too envious of other women. Men are already quite vain enough thinking we fight each other like cats for their attention, aren’t they? – Giulia Farnese”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“It happens, you know. Strain. It gets even the best brains in the business. Sometimes the best brains are the ones that get it worst.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“It is better to be feared than loved. —MACHIAVELLI”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“It is facile to condemn the French for giving in to the Nazis too easily when many French citizens would have still borne the horrendous scars of the first occupation, would have clearly remembered having to stand back while German sentries robbed them of everything but the nearly inedible ration bread because the only alternative was to be arrested, beaten, or shot. The French survived not one but two brutal occupations in a span of less than forty years, and deserve more credit for their flinty endurance than they receive.” (Kate Quinn Quotes)
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. —MARCUS AURELIUS”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“It was the first thing I noticed about him. He could admire a lady as though he were admiring a beautiful porcelain vase, without making her feel he was affixing a price tag.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“It will be different, she told herself, after the war. When they weren’t trying to conduct a marriage almost entirely by post.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Lethe is the river of forgetfulness that runs through the underworld, so the classics tell us, and there is nothing more potent than forgetfulness.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Life is not a math problem, Charlotte.” If it was, I’d have been a lot better at it. I’d often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve. Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer here to solve for.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Life is short, Hades is long. As Agathon says, you can’t change the past, and as Aristotle says—paraphrasing—things are as they are, it’s how we deal with them that counts.”
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“Life ought to be more like a play; the entrances and exits would be a lot cleaner.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Listen to an enemy rant and you can learn much about him.”
Kate Quinn
Ribbons of Scarlet

“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too. —MARCUS AURELIUS”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“Making history was so much better than writing it.”
Kate Quinn
Daughters of Rome

“Many a gem lies hidden in darkness and oblivion.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Marry for friendship, not love. Friends listen better than lovers!”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Maybe his japes drove me to distraction sometimes, but he was still my big brother, and a girl with a proper big brother is never alone.”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“Men are strange creatures…If a woman surrenders her virtue to an enemy, they are confident her patriotism can’t be far behind. They have very little faith in a woman’s ability to resist falling in love with a man who beds her. Besides, a horizontale isn’t respectable, and a spy’s business is already disreputable enough. We can’t bring shame on our country by staining our reputations — if we’re to engage in espionage, we must do it as ladies.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Men demonstrate their courage more often in little things than in great. —BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE”
Kate Quinn
The Lion and the Rose

“Moments like this should have been glorious, and they never were. The monsters always looked so ordinary and pathetic, in the flesh.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“Never trust a German to get a sauce right. Their solution to everything is just add more butter.”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“Nina took the air, feeling her arms disappear into the wings, her blood into the fuel line.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“No, it’s the tin trade he wants to control and access to our strait and all the rest of the goods that flow though Troy.”
Kate Quinn
A Song of War

“Noone should tell their mother more than one third what they get up to.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Not wise, perhaps, to be rude to the Pope’s favorite son, but my viper tongue still required a fool now and then on which to exercise its edges, and Juan Borgia served admirably in place of drunken innkeepers and tavern cheats.”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear. —MARCUS AURELIUS”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“One college sophomore minus one small encumbrance, divided by six months’ passage of time, multiplied by ten Paris frocks and a new haircut will not magically equal one restored reputation.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Osla Kendall is lightly fictionalized from the real-life Osla Benning, a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip’s long-term wartime girlfriend.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Penthesilea knew what it was to cry that way, to pour out a river of tears so deep and fast it choked off breath but was still not deep enough to drown sorrow.”
Kate Quinn
A Song of War

“People suspect women of hanky-panky. But they never suspect women of espionage. No one thinks women can keep secrets.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“Pin all your impatience on growing up, she thought, and then you learn it gets no better when you’re grown.”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“Poetry is like passion-it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Retirement kills people like us, Eve. It’s how we die if the bullets don’t get there first.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Rose wasn’t going to write a book or swim the Channel or do anything different – because once you’re pregnant, you’re finished.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Seize the night; trust as little as possible in tomorrow”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“Some men ogle, some men look. The first makes us bristle, and the second makes us melt, and men are at an utter loss knowing the difference. But we do, and we know it at once.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“Steel blades such as you and I do not measure against the standards for ordinary women.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“Stephanie Thornton has been obsessed with history’s forgotten women since she was twelve. She is the critically acclaimed author of four novels about infamous women from the ancient world: The Secret History, Daughter of the Gods, The Tiger Queens, and The Conqueror’s Wife.”
Kate Quinn
A Song of War

“Such was the cost of dealing with the Romans: even when one fought against them, the stain of their violence licked and crackled at the soul like a fire about to engulf an entire forest.” (Kate Quinn Quotes)
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“That doesn’t mean you were boring, ma p’tite. Just bored. Most women are bored, because being female is boring. We only get married because it’s something to do, and then we have children and find out babies are the only thing more boring than other women.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“The anticipation was so sweet it cut the mouth, like winter-cold water from the icy shore of the Old Man.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“The best lies have the most truth.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury. —MARCUS AURELIUS”
Kate Quinn
Lady of the Eternal City

“The crowd’s murmuring rose to a roar, and for the first time in a week the agony of worry for my son was drowned out as his father strode out onto the sand. Arius.”
Kate Quinn
Mistress of Rome

“The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“The habit of nagging, let me assure you, goes with a nurse no matter what she does.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“The idea made her sick and scared, but so what? Why did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done anyway?”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“The kind of home where a child learned quickly to slide unseen around the edges of rooms, to vanish like a shadow in a black night at the first rumble on the domestic horizon.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“The last thing a man at war needed was gloom from the home front.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“The most famous victim of the surgery is probably JFK’s intellectually disabled sister, Rosemary Kennedy: subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy at twenty-three in an attempt to calm her emotional outbursts, she spent the remaining sixty years of her life institutionalized, reduced to the mental capacity of a toddler.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“The nightmare hours belonged to happier conversations.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“The sight of iniquity, immorality, pure evil, perhaps the world’s end; a kitchen in disorder.”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions… even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“There isn’t much point in an adventure if you only do the fun parts, is there?”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“There’s simply nothing like French cigarettes, French knickers, or French men!”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“They say opposites attract, but like meets like, too.”
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“To the world—because if I get to spend my life seeing it, I should spend my life improving it too, in whatever way I can. I push my limits as far as I can, get away with as much adventure as I dare, but there’s still always duty waiting.”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“True respect if formed when you find something upon which you disagree and yet remain on good terms.”
Kate Quinn
Ribbons of Scarlet

“Want to be in love as much as any girl, Vix. I just don’t want to be obligated by it.”
Kate Quinn
Empress of the Seven Hills

“Wars are cyclical. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when they come round again.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“We all fight our own daemons.” Mine just happened to be louder than others.”
Kate Quinn
A Song of War

“We ladies pinch and make do when it comes to darning stockings and using bootblack for eyeliner, but at least we can top a worn-out ensemble with a really smashing hat. That’s very good for morale, in wartime.” (Kate Quinn Quotes)
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“We loved each other by proxy, Mr. Graham. He loved me through a girl he saw once in Paris in 1918, and I loved him through his letters, but we hardly spent any time together. I don’t have any personal anecdotes about my husband. We didn’t have time to create any.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“We’re standing in the ashes of a war like no other—if we don’t try harder to see the shades of gray involved, we’ll find ourselves in the thick of a new one.”
Kate Quinn
The Huntress

“Welcome to real spy work. Mostly tedious, occasionally exhilarating.”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?”
Kate Quinn
The Alice Network

“What good was a life that brought so much suffering? What good was a life?”
Kate Quinn
Ribbons of Scarlet

“What’s Enigma?” Beth said, utterly bewildered. “The machine the enemy uses to encrypt most of their military traffic.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“When a girl has broken national security to ease your mind about your family’s lying in the path of an invasion route, she has officially become a friend.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code

“When a man gives you jewels, even if you’re planning to throw them back in his face, you should remember his name.”
Kate Quinn
The Serpent and the Pearl

“Why did so many die in the night? As though they wished to kiss us and deliver us with sweet dreams before taking their leave of the world.”
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“Women are not always what we seem to be. What our reputations would tell you. Nor do we only exist in reference to our fathers, husbands, and sons.”
Kate Quinn
A Year of Ravens

“You don’t know how men sometimes use women. How they use and then leave women they never intended to marry. Nice boys do that. Gentlemen do that. Even princes.”
Kate Quinn
The Rose Code