Top 120 Ava Reid Quotes (2026 Update)

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

— Ava Reid

2. “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

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

— Ava Reid

5. “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

6. “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

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

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

— Ava Reid

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

— Ava Reid

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

— Ava Reid

12. “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

13. “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

14. “I will love you to ruination.”

— Ava Reid

15. “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

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

— Ava Reid

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

— Ava Reid

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

— Ava Reid

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

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

— Ava Reid

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Ava Reid

27. “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

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

— Ava Reid

29. “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

30. “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

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

— Ava Reid

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

— Ava Reid

33. “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

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

— Ava Reid

35. “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

36. “A romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily.”

— Ava Reid

37. “But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green with her teeth.”

— Ava Reid

38. “Princes didn’t come for women; they only came for girls with intact and immaculate maidenheads, opening them up like flowers waiting to be plucked.”

— Ava Reid

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

— Ava Reid

40. “Madness, of all things, is the most unforgivable in a woman.”

— Ava Reid

41. “If there is one great virtue of girlhood, it is the insulation of dreams. We are protected, as children, by our belief in the unreal.”

— Ava Reid

42. “It’s all right,” she said. That was easy to say, too. In fact, Effy realized, she could tell the whole story as if it had happened to someone else, and it would be completely painless.”

— Ava Reid

43. “Love whispers, grief shouts.”

— Ava Reid

44. “It’s alright Effy. Really. The fear doesn’t have to break you. You deserve to live anyway.”

— Ava Reid

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

— Ava Reid

46. “Perhaps it is not cleverness that seeps through the generations but cruelty. One cold creature weaning another.”

— Ava Reid

47. “Small-minded traditionalists always reject what they don’t understand.”

— Ava Reid

48. “The only enemy is the sea.”

— Ava Reid

49. “Most of the wizards in Oblya took mortal women as their brides, due to the fact that witches have a tendency to become wickeder when they become wives. Some, I had heard, even grew a second set of sharp teeth and ate their husbands.”

— Ava Reid

50. “Now she is a creature in a conch shell, everything spiraling out from around her.”

— Ava Reid