Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Father, I am what you made me. I’ve become your daughter after all.”

— Holly Black

55. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

57. “Fire can either burn down your house or warm it.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

59. “Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

62. “There’s always something left to lose.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

65. “Show your power by appearing powerless.”

— Holly Black

66. “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

67. “You must be strong enough to strike and strike and strike again without tiring. The first lesson is to make yourself that strong.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

69. “We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That’s why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.”

— Holly Black

70. “Crippled things are always more beautiful. It’s the flaw that brings out beauty.”

— Holly Black

71. “That’s what comes of hungering for something; you forget to check if it’s rotten before you gobble it down.”

— Holly Black

72. “Our lives are the only real thing we have, our only coin. We get to buy what we want with them.”

— Holly Black

73. “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

74. “I hate that everyone calls it growing up, but it seems like DYING.”

— Holly Black

75. “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

76. “I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear. Your heart beats fast. Your senses are heightened. You grow light-headed, maybe even dizzy.”

— Holly Black

77. “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest that your hearts blood should run cold.”

— Holly Black

78. “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

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

— Holly Black

80. “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

81. “Mine. The language of love is like that, possessive. That should be the first warning that it’s not going to encourage anyone’s betterment.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

85. “Fairy tales have a moral: Stay on the path. Don’t trust wolves. Don’t steal things, not even things you think no normal person would care about. Share your food but don’t trust people who want to share their good with you; don’t eat their shiny red apples, not their candy houses, nor any of it. Be nice, always nice, and polite to everyone: kings and beggars, witches and wounded bears. Don’t break a promise.”

— Holly Black

86. “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

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

— Holly Black

88. “You think because you can humiliate me, you can control me?”

— Holly Black

89. “They took lots of things they had no right to.”

— Holly Black

90. “Wisdom is for the meek,” he returns. “And it seldom helps them as much as they believe it will. After all, as wise as you are, you still married Locke. Of course, perhaps you are wiser than even that – perhaps you’re so wise you made yourself a widow, too.”

— Holly Black

91. “What could I become if I stopped worrying about death, about pain, about anything? If I stopped trying to belong?”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

93. “You’ve got to grow where you’re planted.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

95. “Like all schools, we are always interested in learning, in research, in pushing the limits of knowledge. But we must balance that with our duty to protect the world, even from ourselves.”

— Holly Black

96. “Marks forget that whenever something’s too good to be true, that’s because it’s a con.”

— Holly Black

97. “Mutually assured destruction.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

100. “I envy what I fear and hate what I envy.”

— Holly Black