50 Important Quotes You Should Pay Attention to in Burial Rites

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#11: Perhaps Rósa and I might have had been friends if we’d met in another way. Natan always said we were as alike as a swan to a raven, but he was wrong.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Rósa
• Techniques: Motif, contrast, simile, symbolism
• Chapter 10

#12: Don’t be fooled. Just because you play at being a wife, does not make you a married woman, Agnes.

• Characters: Daníel Gudmundsson (Speaker), Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Juxtaposition, harsh tone
• Chapter 10

#13: She took out a dark skirt with an embroidered pattern about the hem and laid it carefully on the blankets beside her. Then she did the same with a white cotton shirt, an embroidered bodice, and finally a striped apron. She smoothed the wrinkles out of the folds of material with both hands.

• Characters: Margrét
• Techniques: Imagery, symbolism, characterisation 
• Chapter 13

Truth and Memory Quotes from Burial Rites 

#14: Then I understood that it was not me they stared at. I understood that these people did not see me. I was two dead man. I was a burning farm. I was a knife. I was blood.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Metonym, anaphora, first-person narration 
• Chapter 2

#15: How can I say what it was like to breathe again? I felt newborn. I staggered in the light of the world and took deep gulps of fresh sea air. It was late in the day: the wet mouth of the afternoon was full on my face. My soul blossomed in that brief moment as they led me out of doors. I fell, my skirts in the mud, and I turned my face upwards as if in prayer. I could have wept from the relief of light.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Imagery, first-person narration, pathos, imagery
• Chapter 2

#16: Seeing Fridrick hack at the sheep with his boots unsettled something within me. It was portentous: the rapid limbs, dark against the snow, colliding with the soft corpse until a fine mist of blood floated above.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Fridrik Sigurdsson
• Techniques: Foreshadowing, asyndeton, motif
• Chapter 3

#17: They did not let me say what happened in my own way, but took my memories of Illugastadir, of Natan, and wrought them onto something sinister; they wrested my statement of that night and made me seem malevolent. Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own. 

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Polysyndeton, long sentence, pleonasm
• Chapter 4

#18: To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti)
• Techniques: Juxtaposition, motif
• Chapter 4

#19: 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.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Proverb, metaphor, symbolism
• Chapter 4

#20: 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. 

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Fragmented sentence structure, tricolon
• Chapter 7

#21: She said Natan had started giving himself some airs, calling himself Lyngdal, not Ketilsson, though neither of us could work out why — it was a strange sort of name to have, not Icelandic in the slightest. 

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti), Natan Ketilsson
• Techniques: Characterisation, connotations, anecdote
• Chapter 7

#22: We are passing through the strange hills at the mouth of the valley and I hear the caw of ravens.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Motif, fist-person narration, symbolism
• Chapter 2

#23: He liked the fact that I was a bastard, a pauper, a servant. ‘You have had to fight for everything,’ he said. ‘You take life by the teeth, Agnes. You are not like Rosa.’

• Characters: Natan Ketilsson (Speaker), Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Tricolon, anaphora, contrast 
• Chapter 10

#24: At that point…I saw what Fridrik held in his hands. It was a hammer and a knife. What do I remember? I didn’t believe him. I went back to my bed on the floor of the cowshed, suddenly weary. I wanted nothing to do with him. What happened?

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Fridrik Sigurdsson
• Techniques: Foreshadowing, truncated sentence structure, first-person narration, aporia
• Chapter 12

#25: The knife went in easily. It pierced Natan’s shirt with neat rips, sounding like an ill-practised kiss – I couldn’t have stopped if I’d wanted to. My fist jerked, until I felt sudden, close warmth over my wrist and realised that his blood covered my hand.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Natan Ketilsson, Fridrik Sigurdsson
• Techniques: Simile, contrast, imagery, oxymoronic language
• Chapter 12

#26: I am the dead bird on the shore. I am dry, I am not certain I will bleed when they drag me out to meet the axe. No, I am still warm, my blood still howls in my veins like the wind itself, and it shakes the empty nest and asks where all the birds have gone, where have they gone?

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Contrast, motif, repetition, consonance 
• Chapter 13

Quotes about Power of Religion from Burial Rites

#27: We are all God’s children, he thought to himself. This woman is my sister in Jesus, and I, as her spiritual brother, must guide her home…“I will save her,” he whispered.

• Characters: Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti) (Speaker), Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Hopeful tone, metaphor, biblical reference
• Chapter 1

#28: The farmer Björn did not like that I knew the sagas better than him. You’re better off keeping company with the sheep, Agnes. Book written by man, not God, are faithless friends and not for your kind.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Björn 
• Techniques: Characterisation, cultural allusion
• Chapter 2

#29: He wanted to turn away, flee at the sight of her. Like a coward.

• Characters: Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti), Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker) 
• Techniques: Simile, third-person narration
• Chapter 2

#30: ‘Is it necessary to keep her bound like a lamb ripe for slaughter?’ she asked him.

• Characters: Margrét (Speaker), Officer, Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Motif, simile, connotations, biblical symbolism
• Chapter 2

#31: 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.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Polysyndeton, parataxis, surrendered tone
• Chapter 3

#32: I prefer a story to a prayer.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Juxtaposition, first-person narration 
• Chapter 3

#33: It’s become apparent to me that the condemned requires means other than religious rebuke to acquaint herself with death and prepare for her meeting with the Lord

• Characters: Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti) (Speaker), Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Metonym, euphemism, characterisation 
• Chapter 7

#34: What else is God good for other than a distraction from the mire we’re all stranded in?

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker) 
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, metaphor
• Chapter 10

#35: I won’t let go of you. God is all around us, Agnes. I won’t ever let go.

• Characters: Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti) (Speaker), Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Repetition, hyperbole 
• Chapter 13

#36: Tóti heard Margrét click her tongue. ‘It’s not right,’ she was muttering. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

• Characters: Margrét (Speaker), Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti) 
• Techniques: Pathos, plain tone, third-person narration
• Chapter 13

Isolation

#37: She watched as Agnes bent her head over the kettle’s rim and scooped handfuls  of  greasy water into her mouth, gasping and drinking with the same urgency as an animal at a trough.

• Characters: Margrét, Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Connotations, simile, motif 
• Chapter 2

#38: Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Chiasmus, symbolism
• Chapter 2

#39: Why, for having a murderess under your family’s roof! For being forced to look at her hideous face every day! For the fear it must inspire in you, for your own good self and your husband and poor daughters!

• Characters: Róslín (Speaker), Margrét
• Techniques: Exclamatory language, anaphora 
• Chapter 3

#40: It  seems wrong to call her by a Christian name, Margrét thought. What would they have called her in Stora Borg, she wondered. Prisoner? Accused? Condemned? Perhaps it was the absence of a name, the silence where a name should be, that they had summoned her by.

• Characters: Margrét, Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Metonym, third-person narration, sibilance, amplification
• Chapter 3

#41: Have you no idea of how the world works, Reverend… it seems a lesser crime to create a child with an unmarried man than one already bound in flesh and soul to another woman.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker), Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti)
• Techniques: Juxtaposition, biblical allusion
• Chapter 4

#42: Bastard pauper with a conniving spirit like you’d never see in a proper maid. 

• Characters: Dagga (Speaker), Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson (Tóti)
• Techniques: Simile, contrast, harsh tone 
• Chapter 4

#43: ‘No doves come from ravens’ eggs,’ Margrét agreed.

• Characters: Margrét, Ingibjörg Pétursdóttir
• Techniques: Proverb, symbolism, motif
• Chapter 5

#44: It seems everyone I love is taken from me and buried in the ground, while I remain alone.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Juxtaposition, parataxis
• Chapter 6

#45: This is my life as it used to be: up to my elbows in the guts of things, working towards a kind of survival. The girls chatter and laugh as they stuff the bags with the bloody mix. I can forget who I am. 

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Fragmented sentence, first-person narration, contrast
• Chapter 8

#46: Do these dumb animals know their fate? Rounded up and separated, they only have to wait one icy night in fear. I have been in the killing pen for months.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, metaphor, symbolism
• Chapter 8

#47: Agnes Jonsdottir. She sounds like the woman I should have been…She could even have been the sister of Sigurlaug and Steinvor Jonsdottir. Margret’s daughter. Born blessed under a marriage. Born into a family that would not be ripped apart by poverty. 

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Pathos, sibilance, parallel syntax
• Chapter 9

#48: Natan never stopped loving her. How could he? Her poetry made lamps out of people. 

• Characters: Natan Ketilsson, Rósa
• Techniques: Rhetorical question, metaphor, consonance 
• Chapter 10

#49: Where would I have gone? I knew only the valley of Vatnsdalur; knew where it was scabbed with rock, knew the white-headed mountains and the lake alive with swans, and the wrinkled skins of turf by the river. And the ravens, the constant, circling ravens.

• Characters: Agnes Magnúsdottir (Speaker)
• Techniques: Motif, imagery, anaphora, pathetic fallacy
• Chapter 10 

#50: The farmer Gudmundur Ketilsson, who had been ordered to be executioner, committed the work that he had been asked to do with dexterity and fearlessness. 

• Characters: Gudmundur Ketilsson, Agnes Magnúsdottir
• Techniques: Lexicon, symbolism, third-person narration
• Epilogue