Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “You really do want me,′ I say, close enough to feel the warmth of his breath as it hitches. ‘And you hate it.”

— Holly Black

52. “I can’t trust the people I care about not to hurt me. And I’m not sure I can trust myself not to hurt them, either.”

— Holly Black

53. “All power is cursed,” I say. “The most terrible among us will do anything to get it, and those who’d wield power best don’t want it thrust upon them. But that doesn’t mean they can avoid their responsibilities forever.”

— Holly Black

54. “Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear.”

— Holly Black

55. “A well-seasoned strategist waits for the right opportunity.”

— Holly Black

56. “I’ve loved you from the first hour of our meeting. I loved you and despaired. Before I die, I want you to know that.”

— Holly Black

57. “The easiest lies to tell are the ones you want to be true.”

— Holly Black

58. “The point of a fight is not to have a good fight, it’s to win.”

— Holly Black

59. “Secrets hurt the keeper more than you think.”

— Holly Black

60. “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. Be good, but not too good. Be pretty, but not too pretty. Be honest, but not too honest. Maybe no one got lucky. Maybe it was too hard.”

— Holly Black

61. “Maybe it isn’t the worst thing to want to be loved, even if you’re not. Even if it hurts. Maybe being human isn’t always being weak.”

— Holly Black

62. “We are all capable of great self-deception when it serves us.”

— Holly Black

63. “Rules are different for poets.”

— Holly Black

64. “You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want.”

— Holly Black

65. “This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.”

— Holly Black

66. “The only way to end grief was to go through it.”

— Holly Black

67. “She’d always been a little contemptuous of beauty, as though it was something you had to trade away some other vital thing for.”

— Holly Black

68. “Mutually assured destruction.”

— Holly Black

69. “She loved him so much, that it already hurt. It already felt like he’d broken her heart.”

— Holly Black

70. “Protecting somebody by hurting them before someone else gets the chance isn’t the kind of protecting that anybody wants.”

— Holly Black

71. “She came out of sleep like a thunderclap – waking from dreams so deep and dark that she couldn’t remember anything but dirt and hands pulling her down into graves with cities inside them.”

— Holly Black

72. “She fell asleep like a flame being extinguished.”

— Holly Black

73. “Come home and shout at me. Come home and fight with me. Come home and break my heart, if you must.”

— Holly Black

74. “Kiss me again,” he says, drunk and foolish. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”

— Holly Black

75. “Sweet Jude, you’re my dearest punishment.”

— Holly Black

76. “You want me to say something? Okay. Sometimes I think I am what you made me. And sometimes I don’t know who I am at all. And either way I’m not happy.”

— Holly Black

77. “There’s people who do things and people who never do – who say they will someday, but they just don’t. I want to go on a quest. I’ve always wanted to go on a quest. And now that I have one, I’m not backing down from it. I’m not going home until it’s complete.”

— Holly Black

78. “It’s you I love,” he says. ”I spent much of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn’t have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing. But it is yours.”

— Holly Black

79. “I hate you,” I breathed into his mouth. “I hate you so much that sometimes I can’t think of anything else.”

— Holly Black

80. “Desire is an odd thing. As soon as it’s sated, it transmutes. If we receive golden thread, we desire the golden needle.”

— Holly Black

81. “I have lied and I have betrayed and I have triumphed. If only there was someone to congratulate me.”

— Holly Black

82. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”

— Holly Black

83. “There is no banquet too abundant for a starving man.”

— Holly Black

84. “He’s flint, you’re tinder.”

— Holly Black

85. “The first boy I fell in love with didn’t know I loved him, but he managed to break my heart anyway.”

— Holly Black

86. “Kill him before he makes you love him.”

— Holly Black

87. “I feel like a constellation of wounds, held together with string and stubbornness.”

— Holly Black

88. “A sharp tongue is no match for a sharp tooth.”

— Holly Black

89. “Show your power by appearing powerless.”

— Holly Black

90. “He presses his mouth to the pulse point of my wrist, racing in time with my heart. “Mock me all you like. Whatever I imagined then, now it is I who would beg and grovel for a kind word from your lips.” His eyes are black with desire. “By you, I am forever undone.”

— Holly Black

91. “Love changes us, but we change how we love too.”

— Holly Black

92. “I want to win. I do not yearn to be their equal. In my heart, I yearn to best them.”

— Holly Black

93. “And no matter how eager you are for it, you cannot make the moon set nor rise any faster.”

— Holly Black

94. “Whoever controls the king, controls the kingdom.”

— Holly Black

95. “Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go. I will go way too far.”

— Holly Black

96. “Only idiots aren’t scared of things that are scary.”

— Holly Black

97. “Clever girl. You play with fire because you want to be burnt.”

— Holly Black

98. “The odd thing about ambition is this: You can acquire it like a fever, but it is not so easy to shed.”

— Holly Black

99. “If he thought I was bad, I would be worse. If he thought I was cruel, I would be horrifying.”

— Holly Black

100. “I knew little else, but I always knew you.”

— Holly Black