Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “I guess it’s true; no one will ever love you like your family.”

— Holly Black

102. “She tastes like every dark thought I’ve ever had.”

— Holly Black

Featured in: Romance Quotes

103. “That boy is your weakness.”

— Holly Black

104. “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

105. “Because you’re like a story that hasn’t happened yet. Because I want to see what you will do. I want to be part of the unfolding of the tale.”

— Holly Black

106. “He hates you. Even if he wants you, he hates you. Maybe he hates you the more for it.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

108. “Storms are less fickle than they are, seas less capricious.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

111. “You can take a thing when no one’s looking. But defending it, even with all the advantage on your side, is no easy task,” Madoc told her with a laugh. She looked up to find him offering her a hand. “Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to.”

— Holly Black

112. “And the single last thing in my head: that I like him better than I’ve ever liked anyone and that of all the things he’s ever done to me, making me like him so much is by far the worst.”

— Holly Black

113. “I am coming unraveled. I am coming undone.”

— Holly Black

114. “You are the only thing I have that is neither duty nor obligation, the only thing I chose for myself. The only thing I want.”

— Holly Black

115. “It occurs to me that if I kill him, I can finally stop thinking about him. If I kill him, I won’t have to feel like this anymore.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

117. “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

118. “Do you know what mortal means? It means born to die. It means deserving of death. That’s what you are, what defines you – dying.”

— Holly Black

119. “I remember what it was to hate him with the whole of my heart, but I’ve remembered too late.”

— Holly Black

120. “Love is a noble cause. How can anything done in the service of a noble cause be wrong?”

— Holly Black

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Holly Black

129. “Cruddy Mouthbreather.”

— Holly Black

130. “I survive at the edge of friends circles.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

132. “It’s not that I don’t know that it’s a bad idea. It’s that, lately, bad ideas have a particular hold over me.”

— Holly Black

133. “A second book that makes you rethink the first book is the Holy Grail of a series.”

— Holly Black

134. “Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.”

— Holly Black

Featured in: Reading Quotes

135. “If you don’t know why you’re apologizing, your apology probably sucks.”

— Holly Black

136. “He leans in and closes his eyes. “Most of all, I hate you because I think of you. Often. It’s disgusting, and I can’t stop.” I am shocked into silence.”

— Holly Black

137. “I hate him more than all the others. I hate him so much that sometimes when I look at him, I can hardly breathe.”

— Holly Black

138. “One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.”

— Holly Black

139. “We’re all dying, Cassel. It’s just that some of us are dying faster than others.”

— Holly Black

140. “The whole place looks straight out of a fairy tale, the kind where love is a simple thing. never the cause of pain.”

— Holly Black

141. “Once, there was a girl who vowed she would save everyone in the world, but forgot herself.”

— Holly Black

142. “I start to speak, but he stops me with a gesture. “And you.” He looks at me, his lips curving in something that’s not quite a smile; it’s more and less than that. “I knew little else, but I always knew you.” And when he kisses me, I feel as though I can finally breathe again.”

— Holly Black

143. “Jude. You are in no mood for games, very well. I am in no mood for them, either. Let me write it outright; You are pardoned. I revoke your banishment. I rescind my words. Come home. Come home and shout at me. Come home and fight with me. Come home and break my heart, if you must. Just come home.”

— Holly Black

144. “Marry me,” he says. “Become the Queen of Elfhame.”

— Holly Black

145. “She’s my wife,” Cardan says, his voice carrying over the crowd. “The rightful High Queen of Elfhame. And most definitely not in exile.”

— Holly Black

146. “Even if, by some miracle, I could be better than them, I will never be one of them.”

— Holly Black

147. “Jude, you can’t really think I don’t know it’s you. I knew you from the moment you walked into the brugh.”

— Holly Black

148. “I wasn’t kind, Jude. Not to many people. Not to you. I wasn’t sure if I wanted you or if I wanted you gone from my sight so that I would stop feeling as I did, which made me even more unkind. But when you were gone – truly gone beneath the waves – I hated myself as I never have before.”

— Holly Black

149. “Life’s full of opportunities to make crappy decisions that feel good. And after the first one, the rest get a whole lot easier.”

— Holly Black

150. “Tell me what I must slay, what I must steal, tell me the riddle I must solve or the hag I must trick. Only tell me the way, and I will do it, no matter the danger, no matter the hardship, no matter the cost.”

— Holly Black