Top 50 Ava Reid Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I will love you to ruination,” the Fairy King said, brushing a strand of golden hair from my cheek. “Yours or mine?” I asked. The Fairy King did not answer.”

— Ava Reid

2. “I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me.”

— Ava Reid

3. “The juniper tree looked as stolid as a grave marker, unruffled. Under the dirt was the compact and inside the compact was the black sand and in every grain of sand was Sevas, my first secret, my first lie, safe as death.”

— Ava Reid

4. “When men fall into the sea, they drown. When women meet the water, they transform. It becomes vital to ask: is this a metamorphosis, or a homecoming?”

— Ava Reid

5. “That was the cruelest irony: the more you did to save yourself, the less you became a person worth saving.”

— Ava Reid

6. “She was tired, tired of trying so hard for something she didn’t even want.”

— Ava Reid

7. “If you stare long enough into the darkness of the forest, eventually something will stare right back.”

— Ava Reid

8. “I think of him so often I would recognize even his silhouette if he were only a painted shadow on the wall.”

— Ava Reid

9. “If it is a choice between drowning in the same river that has dragged me down a thousand times or walking into a pit of fire that had never burned me once, I will choose the flames and learn to bear it.”

— Ava Reid

10. “It began as all things did: a girl on the shore, terrified and desirous.”

— Ava Reid

11. “There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.”

— Ava Reid

12. “I will love you to ruination.”

— Ava Reid

13. “What’s the point of having power if you balk at every chance to wield it?”

— Ava Reid

14. “How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.”

— Ava Reid

15. “You should know, of course, that there are only two kinds of mothers in stories, and if you are a mother, you are either wicked or you are dead.”

— Ava Reid

16. “I’d rather die with a blade in my hand, or at least with fire in my heart, than live as the shadow of the shadow.”

— Ava Reid

17. “If a story repeated itself so many times over, building itself up brick by brick, did it eventually become the truth? A house with no doors and no windows, offering no escape.”

— Ava Reid

18. “I’ve spent the last fortnight fearing you would destroy me. You may still.”

— Ava Reid

19. “Midnight was a fairy-tale thing. She didn’t know if Preston had been thinking about that when he promised it, but Effy was remembering all the curses that turned princesses back to peasant girls as soon as the bell struck twelve. Why was it always girls whose forms could not be trusted? Everything could be taken away from them in an instant.”

— Ava Reid

20. “You let me eat up all papa’s anger so it wouldn’t poison you. you didn’t mind that he ruined me as long as you were unspoiled and safe. If you ever loved me, it was because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.”

— Ava Reid

21. “Somewhere in the time since I left Keszi, I have begun to wish for more. For the gentle embrace of my father, for a quill and ink I could use to write out my own name, for stories that didn’t make me flush with apology for daring to speak them. For a man who kneels with my name on his lips.”

— Ava Reid

22. “The Fairy King was all of them,” said Angharad. “Every wanting man has the same wound he can use to slip in.”

— Ava Reid

23. “The trees have to be tied down by sunset. When the Woodsmen come, they always try to run.”

— Ava Reid

24. “I remember how the fire roared to life in front of the captain, so sudden and sure. Any wolf-girl would have marveled at such a fire, easily as impressive as the work of our best fire-makers. We would have called it power, magic. They called it piety. But what is the difference, if both fires burn just as bright?”

— Ava Reid

25. “The nature of a bargain, regrettably, is that we belong to each other.”

— Ava Reid

26. “You don’t have to love something in order to devote yourself to it.”

— Ava Reid

27. “All that talk of quiet obedience is for their benefit, not yours. They don’t have to go to the effort of striking you down if you’re already on your knees.”

— Ava Reid

28. “A bargain between a Woodsman and a wolf-girl already seems a fragile and terrible thing. Whose god would approve of it?”

— Ava Reid

29. “I think I loved you then, and hated myself for it.”

— Ava Reid

30. “That was the truth at the very center of everything, the truth she had tried her whole life to evade: there were no fairies, no magic, and the world was just ordinary and cruel.”

— Ava Reid

31. “My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one ever told me I was allowed to scream.”

— Ava Reid

32. “It filled me with a terrible pity and guilt, so perfunctory it was as if I’d been made for it, a machine for dispensing grief.”

— Ava Reid

33. “He believed me, I could tell, or at least he wanted to. I wanted desperately to believe myself. It was better than the alternative: that the ghost of the girl I was still haunted these halls, and she would posses me whenever my body ached like a wound that would let her slip inside. Perhaps she would never let me go.”

— Ava Reid

34. “They are not terrible. They are just the truth.”

— Ava Reid

35. “Stories are supposed to live longer than people.”

— Ava Reid

36. “Your life still depends on my survival. If the prince perishes on your watch, you’ll be the one to pay for it. Tell me, wolf-girl, who belongs to whom?”

— Ava Reid

37. “It was an eternal feeling, this sense of being unwelcome. No matter where she was, Effy was always afraid she was not wanted.”

— Ava Reid

38. “Effy was no great designer, but she was an excellent escape artist. She was always chipping away at the architecture of her life until there was a crack big enough to slip through. Whenever she was faced with danger, her mind manifested a secret doorway, a hole in the floorboards, somewhere she could hide or run to.”

— Ava Reid

39. “She was afraid of our lives becoming our own. She was afraid of our threads snapping, of us becoming just girls, and not wolf-girls.”

— Ava Reid

40. “I had thought myself truest when I was skinning baby rabbits and seething with vicious hatreds, but perhaps that tenderness is true too.”

— Ava Reid

41. “What would you have me do?′ he asks. ‘You have already ruined me.”

— Ava Reid

42. “I can’t swallow the thought of the Woodsmen killing the little part of her that’s left in me, the facsimile of our shared blood.”

— Ava Reid

43. “Effy found herself half in love with the Fairy King sometimes, too. The tender belly of his cruelty made her heart flutter. There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.”

— Ava Reid

44. “No. The word rose in her mind like a steep and powerful wave, one that darkened the whole shoreline. But it crashed against an invisible seawall, a barrier as stubborn and unrelenting as the face of a cliff.”

— Ava Reid

45. “That is the only way to truly believe in something,” Zsigmond says. “When you’ve weighed and measured it yourself.”

— Ava Reid

46. “Wanting anything ended only in misery.”

— Ava Reid

47. “Effy hated that she couldn’t tell right from wrong, safe from unsafe. Her fear had transfigured the entire world. Looking at anything was like trying to glimpse a reflection in a broken mirror, all of it warped and shattered and strange.”

— Ava Reid

48. “It was a beautiful house, but not a clever one. It was a house with no imagination.”

— Ava Reid

49. “I refuse mirrors,” the Fairy King said. “I refuse them for you, and I refuse them for me. If you want to see what you are, look into the tide pools at dusk. Look into the sea.”

— Ava Reid

50. “Don’t you see? You can take my heart and liver; split open my belly and eat what’s inside. I would sooner bear it than lose you to those who would call you plain-faced, who makes you kneel and kiss their feet. Do not leave me alone. Do not leave me to lick my wounds like a dog before it’s put down. Do not look at the truth of me and then look away. Please, Marlinchen.”

— Ava Reid