Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Yes, my great villan, my darling god. I will be as sober as a stone carving, just as soon as I can.”

— Holly Black

152. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear those words,” he says. “You don’t want me dead.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

155. “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.” He walks to the door to the royal chambers, as though to end the conversation. “You probably guessed as much,” he says. “But just in case you didn’t.”

— Holly Black

156. “I haven’t had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone’s dead and my root beer’s gone.”

— Holly Black

157. “Si eres la enfermedad, supongo que tampoco puedes ser la cura.”

— Holly Black

158. “Mithridatism, it’s called. Isn’t that a funny name? The process of eating poison to build up immunity. So long as I don’t die from it, I’ll be harder to kill.”

— Holly Black

159. “The disturbing thing about Cardan is how well he plays the fool to disguise his own cleverness.”

— Holly Black

160. “You love him, too, I think. You’ve loved him since before you were a prisoner of the Undersea. You loved him when you agreed to marry him. Once this is over, I will find the bravery to tell him.”

— Holly Black

161. “Revenge is sweet, but ice cream is sweeter.” She goes to the freezer and removes a tub of mint chocolate chip. She brings that and two spoons back to the sofa. “For now, accept this delight, unworthy though it is for the Queen of Faerie in exile.”

— Holly Black

162. “It’s the flaw that brings out the beauty.”

— Holly Black

163. “We have lived in our armor for so long, you and I. And now I am not sure if either of us knows how to removes it.”

— Holly Black

164. “I like for things to happen, for stories to unfold. And if I can’t find a good enough story, I make one.”

— Holly Black

165. “I consider all the things I have done to become a worthy adversary of him, but maybe I haven’t been fighting Cardan at all. Maybe I’ve been fighting my own shadow.”

— Holly Black

166. “Go ahead. Insult me.” His eyebrows go up. “I don’t take commands from mortals,” he says with his customary cruel smile.”

— Holly Black

167. “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

168. “The more powerful you become, the more others will find ways to master you. They’ll do it through those you love and those you hate. They will find the bit and the bridle that fits your mouth and will make you yield.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

170. “It was terrifying,” he says, “watching you fall. I mean, you’re generally terrifying, but I am unused to fearing for you. And then I was furious. I am not sure I have ever been that angry before.” “Mortals are fragile,” I say. “Not you,” he says in a way that sounds a little like a lament. “You never break.”

— Holly Black

171. “Do you know what the Turkish say about coffee? It should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.”

— Holly Black

172. “El verdadero poder no se concede, y tampoco se puede arrebatar.”

— Holly Black

173. “With dawn of the new year on the horizon, I resolved to exert my will on the world.”

— Holly Black

174. “Jewels, lies, slips of paper, dried flowers, memories of thing long past, useless quotations, idle hands, beads, buttons, and mischief.”

— Holly Black

175. “I thought love was just supposed to happen when you least expected it, like a sap to the skull.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

177. “As the last Seelie left the hall, Roiben, self-declared King of the Unseelie Court, nearly fell into his throne. Kaye tried to smile at him, but he was not looking at her. He was staring out across the brugh with eyes the color of falling ash. Corny had not stopped laughing.”

— Holly Black

178. “Hazel had received a baby doll that, if you filled it with water, you could squeeze and make it pee, even though she’d wanted a sword like her brother’s.”

— Holly Black

179. “Someone tries to betray the High King, murder. Someone gives you a harsh look, murder. Someone disrespects you, murder. Someone ruins your laundry, murder.”

— Holly Black

180. “You remind me that I am a mere mortal and you are a prince of Faerie. Well, let me remind you that means you have much to lose and I have nothing.”

— Holly Black

181. “Love is stupid. All we do is break one another’s hearts.”

— Holly Black

182. “I am going to keep on defying you. I am going to shame you with my defiance. You remind me that I am a mere mortal and you are a prince of Faerie. Well, let me remind you that means you have much to lose and I have nothing. You may win in the end, you may ensorcell me and hurt me and humiliate me, but I will make sure you lose everything I can take from you on the way down. I promise you this is the least of what I can do.”

— Holly Black

183. “More and more I feel like the boy who cut off his nose to spite his face.”

— Holly Black

184. “I want to tell you so many lies.”

— Holly Black

185. “I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.”

— Holly Black

186. “Three is an odd configuration of sisters. There’s always one on the outside.”

— Holly Black

187. “What does that mean?” The Thistlewitch smiled. “Time will tell. It always does.”

— Holly Black

188. “I expect her to say The Liar. She gives me a tricksy grin, full of secrets. “What else? The Queen.”

— Holly Black

189. “But I will not stand in front of your happiness. I will not even stand in front of misery that you choose for yourself.”

— Holly Black

190. “Faeries make up for their inability to lie with a panoply of deceptions and cruelties. Twisted words, pranks, omissions, riddles, scandals, not to mention their revenges upon one another for ancient, half-remembered slights. Storms are less fickle than they are, seas less capricious.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

192. “I hate you because your father loves you even though you’re a human brat born to his unfaithful wife, while mine never cared for me, though I am a prince of Faerie. I hate you because Locke used you and your sister to make Nicasia cry after he stole her from me. Besides which, after the tournament, Balekin never failed to throw you in my face as the mortal who could best me.”

— Holly Black

193. “The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.”

— Holly Black

194. “Plunge a heated sword into oil, and any small flaw will turn into a crack. But quenched in blood as you were, none of you broke. You were only hardened.”

— Holly Black

195. “I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don’t even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I’m going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn’t involve dying.”

— Holly Black

196. “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

197. “You will need me to sweet-talk the door.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

199. “But kissing Locke never felt the way that kissing Cardan does, like taking a dare to run over knives, like an adrenaline strike of lightning, like the moment when you’ve swum too far out in the sea and there is no going back, only cold black water closing over your head.”

— Holly Black

200. “I kissed him on the mouth, and then I threatened to kiss him some more if he didn’t do exactly what I wanted.”

— Holly Black