Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “I need to make her realize that even terrible memories are better than weird gaps or the hollowness of your feelings not making sense.”

— Holly Black

452. “We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I’m not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam’s homework, bit if it is, his physics teacher is awesome.”

— Holly Black

453. “Some might think of him as a strong draught, burning the back of one’s throat, but invigorating all the same. You might beg to differ. So long as you’re begging, he doesn’t mind a bit.”

— Holly Black

454. “What if the way I am is the way I am? What if, when everything else is different, I’m not?”

— Holly Black

455. “His song began to change. It grew softer, sweeter, like the morning after a long cry, when your head still hurt but your heart was no longer broken.”

— Holly Black

456. “He just looked like a pretty boy, tall and lanky. She thought again of the crumpled paper in her purse and of him, caged beneath a cemetery. How long had he been there? How long had he looked just as he did now? A hundred years? Two hundred? Could he even remember the press of time? Maybe having stepped outside of it would drive anybody crazy.”

— Holly Black

457. “He knew about cures and poultices and the medicinal value of kisses.”

— Holly Black

458. “All friendships are negotiations of power.”

— Holly Black

459. “When I was a kid and brought friends over, I was defiantly proud of the chaos. I liked that I knew how to jump over the piles and the shattered glass while they stumbled. Now it just seems like an ocean of crazy that I have no way to explain.”

— Holly Black

460. “And I will tell you all my stories soon; no more deceptions. But now night is coming for you. We have tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

— Holly Black

461. “After spending months living in the orderly dorms of Wallingford, where they give you a Saturday detention if your room doesn’t pass semi-regular inspections, I feel the old conflicting sense of familiarity and disgust.”

— Holly Black

462. “The military put up barricades around the areas of the cities where the infections broke out. That was the way the first Coldtowns were founded. Vampirism is an American problem, the BBC declared. But the next outbreak was in Hong Kong, then Yokohama, then Marseille, then Brecht, then Liverpool. After that, it spread across Europe like wildfire.”

— Holly Black

463. “I drive him to school, then I break back into Barron’s house. I’m the best kind of thief, the kind that leaves behind items equal in value to those he’s stolen. Then I go home and shave until my skin is as slick as any slickster’s.”

— Holly Black

464. “I said ten years, but perhaps seven will be enough. That’s not so long. Seven years of drinking poison, of never sleeping, of living on high alert. Seven more years, and then maybe Faerie will be a safer, better land. And I will have earned my place in it. The great game, Locke had called it when he accused me of playing it. I wasn’t then, but I am now. And maybe I learned something from Locke. He made me into a story, and now I am going to make a story out of someone else.”

— Holly Black

465. “Everything smelled wet and feral like it did before a thunderstorm, and she wanted to run, swift and eager, beyond the edge of what she could see.”

— Holly Black

466. “He thinks of Elienad, lying beneath tables, listening to the inflections of lies. Watching the hesitations, the gestures, the tensed muscles. Learning a language the king was unaware he even spoke.”

— Holly Black

467. “Once, she made a boy come out of his house and kiss her under the streetlight. It was her first kiss. She thinks it was probably his, too. She never told him and she never, ever will.”

— Holly Black

468. “Things will be as they always are,” he tells me. “Only more so.”

— Holly Black

469. “I say, because if she doesn’t want to talk about that part, she doesn’t have to.”

— Holly Black

470. “He was ruinously beautiful in the way that knives and scalpels can be beautiful.”

— Holly Black

471. “I step out of my second life the same way I stepped out of my first, holding too few things and with great uncertainty about what will happen next.”

— Holly Black

472. “Stories like that were will-o’-the-wisps, glowing in the deepest, darkest parts of forests, leading travelers farther and farther from safety, out toward an ever-moving mark.”

— Holly Black

473. “I guess he’s used to suspicious people with crappy tempers. Or maybe I’ve never seemed as normal as I thought.”

— Holly Black

474. “That’s the spirit.” Aaron hid a grin. He was already wearing his armband, just above his elbow. Somehow he managed to make it look cool. Call had tied his around his forearm and was fairly sure it looked like a bandage.”

— Holly Black

475. “As I make my way back to the tournament and my sisters, I can’t stop thinking of Cardan’s shocked face, nor can I stop considering Locke’s smile. I am not altogether sure which is more thrilling and which more dangerous.”

— Holly Black

476. “Carney is like a graveyard where everyone already owns their plots and has built houses on top of them.”

— Holly Black

477. “It was readers that needed to be protected, he thought. Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.”

— Holly Black

478. “He’s quiet then. We lie next to each other, twin corpses waiting for burial.”

— Holly Black

479. “She went to all the parties and kissed all the boys, shoring up fun against despair, against the suffocating terror that loomed over her.”

— Holly Black

480. “After all, when you were already in a slippery place, reality-wise, you couldn’t afford to assume that things would be straightforward from here on in.”

— Holly Black

481. “You’re young, but you’re ambitious in the way that perhaps only the young can be.”

— Holly Black

482. “She wanted to tell him about Valentina and how she had to go, how she’d promised she’s help, and how she would help, except that right then she didn’t want to help anyone so much as to kiss him and maybe bite him again, too, but mostly kiss him and do all the things that came after kissing.”

— Holly Black

483. “But no one chooses a future. You choose a path without being certain where it leads.”

— Holly Black

484. “She didn’t have to use any magic. I trust you. I trusted you.”

— Holly Black

485. “She was unprepared for how much the way into Coldtown looked like a shoddily run DMV.”

— Holly Black

486. “I can feel myself start to tremble.”

— Holly Black

487. “It’s sweet. All this trouble for a kitty.”

— Holly Black

488. “Pain makes you strong... Get used to the weight.”

— Holly Black

489. “She swallowed his blood, a dark vintage from some forgotten cellar. She felt like Persephone in Hades, pomegranate seeds bursting against her teeth, juice rolling on her tongue, and the more she had, the more she hungered.”

— Holly Black

490. “Some promises aren’t worth keeping.”

— Holly Black

491. “Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves.”

— Holly Black

492. “I’m no longer a child, and I don’t need comfort.”

— Holly Black

493. “I love my parents’ murderer; I suppose I could love anyone.”

— Holly Black

494. “Oak makes a low moan and tries to sit up. ‘Jude,’ he mutters. ‘Jude, we can’t just let him die.”

— Holly Black

495. “What they don’t realize is this: Yes, they frighten me, but I have always been scared, since the day I got here. I was raised by the man who murdered my parents, reared in a land of monsters. I live with that fear, let it settle into my bones, and ignore it. If I didn’t pretend not to be scared, I would hide under my owl-down coverlets in Madoc’s estate forever. I would lie there and scream until there was nothing left of me. I refuse to do that. I will not do that.”

— Holly Black

496. “You’ve delivered your message. I have no bit of doggerel to send back – my own fault for having a seneschal who cannot double as my Court Poet – but I will be sure to crumple up some paper and drop it into the water when I do.”

— Holly Black

497. “I’m afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.”

— Holly Black

498. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He grabs my hand, possibly to keep me from hitting him again. Our fingers lace together. “No, it’s not that, not exactly. I didn’t think I could hurt you. And I never thought you would be afraid of me.”

— Holly Black

499. “Prince Balekin smiles back as though their smiles could duel without the rest of them even being involved.”

— Holly Black

500. “I think he thinks about girlfriend like some kind of honorary title, like the way that every president is still ‘President So and So,’ no matter who’s currently in office.”

— Holly Black