Hannah Kent Quotes

The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the opposite is happening; you're getting colder and colder, as the body heat you brought outside with you seeps out of your skin. Instead of getting used to it, you get weaker the longer you endure it.

You heard it from the heart, you saw it in their eyes. Then I got used to the fact that I couldn't feel my fingers and my feet. That for me was the essence of the battle.

I just really, really hate being cold.

The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.

I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like- the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you.

You've been cold to me so long, I'm crying icicles instead of tears.

The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple.

empty and closed, hovering in some frozen netherworld neither sun nor rain could thaw.

And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.

I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

I'm a person with virtually no feelings.

Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.

As long as I kept my body moving I could forget about the emptiness inside.

I wept not — so to stone I grew within.

One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees, crusted with snow, And have been cold a long time, to behold the junipers, shagged with ice, the spruces, rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land, full of the same wind, blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow, and, nothing herself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.

A heartless hand on my shoulder A push and it's over Alabaster crashes down Six months is a long time Tried living in the real world Instead of a shell But before I began I was bored before I even began

I was becoming the cold, emotionally crippled monster I always wanted to be, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. But it was too late. The metamorphosis was already well under way.

My heart was closed. Cold. I was self-conscious and cynical.

My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry, and I mean to live as long as I can.

In this world, only winter is certain

This is the Hour of Lead- Remembered, if outlived, As freezing persons, recollect the Snow- First-Chill-then Stupor- then the letting go---

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

The hollowness was in his arms and the world was snowing.

There is no such thing as closure, and it wouldn't be worth having if it were available, because all it would mean is that something that was quite an important part of you had gone numb.