Nirrim Quotes

“I wanted to say, I would rather have you for a little time than no time at all.
I will remember you perfectly. My memory will touch your skin, your lips. The memory will hurt, but it will be mine.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Midnight Lie

“Nirrim could have wondered about the truth of what she had lost for every moment of her little life, but she could not have named it, for it was compassion, and it remains the fate of all humans who lack compassion never to understand that they lack it.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Hollow Heart

“I had had no idea that people in the Ward were watching me, that they knew so much about me and they would miss me if I never returned. That they could even want me never to return.
It was a new thought to me: that you could take heart when someone escapes the trap that trapped you.
And yet it shouldn’t have been a new thought, since I had already felt this whenever I forged a passport. I had simply not realized that this was what I had felt.
I had put love into each stitch in each passport’s binding. I just hadn’t known that was what it was, because the only love I had recognized as given to me was the kind that clutched tight, and never let go.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Midnight Lie