Top 120 Ava Reid Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “But I think magic is just the truth that people believe. For most people, that truth is whatever helps them sleep at night, whatever makes their lives easier. It’s different from objective truth.”

— Ava Reid

52. “Anything can be taken from you, at any moment. Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”

— Ava Reid

53. “If the soul of a nation requires an enemy, then it has no right to exist at all.”

— Ava Reid

54. “If you can learn to love that which despises you, that which terrifies you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.”

— Ava Reid

55. “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

56. “What a ruthless privilege it was, he thought, to love.”

— Ava Reid

57. “Lying was a form of survival, a way out of whatever trap had been set.”

— Ava Reid

58. “It’s the oldest story there is, men wanting things that will kill them.”

— Ava Reid

59. “How do we survive when reality becomes too much to bear?”

— Ava Reid

60. “If I have a witch to thank for my curse, she did not change me. She only revealed me.”

— Ava Reid

61. “The only reason anything matters is because it ends,′ he says. ‘I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”

— Ava Reid

62. “The past she carried with her did not have to be a heavy thing, and when she needed to rest, she could put it down.”

— Ava Reid

63. “The truth was very costly at times. How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you.”

— Ava Reid

64. “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

65. “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

66. “When he had stood in the underwater palace and wished for the end to this story, he had wanted no epilogue, no addendum, no sequel. A blank page, upon which a new tale could be written.”

— Ava Reid

67. “No one survives this world alone.”

— Ava Reid

68. “Love is a fire that cannot burn alone.”

— Ava Reid

69. “The trick of any good lie is just finding an audience who wants to believe it.”

— Ava Reid

70. “The wickedness, growing long green tendrils through her veins.”

— Ava Reid

71. “My mind is never empty of you. Not in waking; not even in dreaming.”

— Ava Reid

72. “Everything I think, everything I do, everything I am-it’s just one escape act after another.”

— Ava Reid

73. “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

74. “You know the truth, Ms. Vashchenko. What you want is the courage to believe it.”

— Ava Reid

75. “She should not wear a white garment ever again. At least a dark linen will better hide the blood she sees dripping from her hands, soaking the hem of her dress, and pooling on the floor around her feet.”

— Ava Reid

76. “Lady Roscille. What they say is true. You are so beautiful the moon itself is shamed from rising.”

— Ava Reid

77. “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

78. “But stories were devious things, things with agendas. They could cheat and steal and lie to your face. They could crumble away under your feet.”

— Ava Reid

79. “Although the tide pools had not shown me my face, I had been revealed. I was a treacherous, wrathful, wanting thing, just like he was. Just as he had always wanted me.”

— Ava Reid

80. “Dismally she realized that she had already gone from wishing to be exceptional to wishing to be invisible.”

— Ava Reid

81. “Thinking of her was always like this: a rush of fondness, and then a bolt of fear. Love poems never seemed to include this thread of terror. Was he uniquely ill-disposed to this sentiment, too uneasy, too anxious for the act of loving without reserve? Or was the object of his affection uniquely vulnerable?”

— Ava Reid

82. “As if stories were not spoils of war.”

— Ava Reid

83. “That things are only beautiful because they don’t last- Full moons, flowers in bloom, you.”

— Ava Reid

84. “I looked to the Fairy King behind me, and the ocean before, the two most beautiful things I had ever seen. They were both creatures of rage and salt and foam. Both could strip me to the bone. I wanted nothing more than to tempt their wrath, because if I were brave enough, I might earn their love instead.”

— Ava Reid

85. “Every author who appears to sit in a dark room alone is furnished by the light of those who came before.”

— Ava Reid

86. “The weight of a memory is one thing. You get very used to swimming with it dragging you down. Once it’s loosed, you hardly know what to do with you body. You don’t understand its lightness.”

— Ava Reid

87. “They are two fish in a pool, circling each other, trapped by the same arrangement of stones. Their rhythms are identical, as they push their silver bodies through the water, in and out, like needles through black cloth. He’s the only one who may see her truly. And she does not know why, not yet, but her eyes are two mirrors, throwing his own reflection back at him.”

— Ava Reid

88. “Wanting anything ended only in misery.”

— Ava Reid

89. “But you understood, as I do, that survival is not a battle that you win only once. You must fight it again every day. And so you take your small losses so that you can live to fight tomorrow.”

— Ava Reid

90. “The truth is found in whispers, in sidelong glances, in twitching jaws and clenching fists. What is the need for a lie when no one is listening?”

— Ava Reid

91. “But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry.”

— Ava Reid

92. “It takes strength, to feel so much. To feel so deeply.”

— Ava Reid

93. “She both wanted and did not want to be held, to be touched, to be comforted. She was afraid of wanting becoming needing. And she was afraid, so terribly afraid, that if she needed him, it would be the moment that he slipped away.”

— Ava Reid

94. “A bad memory shared between two people carries with it only half the pain.”

— Ava Reid

95. “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

96. “The better you know someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.”

— Ava Reid

97. “Roscille wonders how many women have stood precisely where she is standing, watching their husbands disappear. Roscille wonders how many of them have imagined the sword-thrust that will make them widows. She wonders how many smiled at the thought.”

— Ava Reid

98. “Looking back, anyone could’ve predicted what happened next. The erosion of lines between corporation and government.”

— Ava Reid

99. “The pills were meant to be a seawall against her visions, against the unreal world that always seemed to be blooming underneath the real one, like the beat of blood behind a bruise, waiting for its moment to break through.”

— Ava Reid

100. “He had loved nothing more than the truth, and she had loved nothing more than her imagined world. Somehow, in spite of that, they had found each other.”

— Ava Reid