Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “There are dog people and cat people.”

— Holly Black

302. “Do you ever feel so angry that you think you could devour the whole world and still not be satisfied?”

— Holly Black

303. “Cardan’s gaze catches mine, and I can’t help the evil smile that pulls up the corners of my mouth. His eyes are bright as coals, his hatred a living thing, shimmering in the air between us like the air above black rocks on a blazing summer day.”

— Holly Black

304. “I can feel the moment he gives in and gives up, pulling me to him despite the threat of the knife. He kisses me hard, with a kind of devouring desperation, fingers digging into my hair. Our mouths slide together, teeth over lips over tongues. Desire hits me like a kick to the stomach. It’s like fighting, except what we’re fighting for is to crawl inside each other’s skin.”

— Holly Black

305. “Maybe the point of real friendship isn’t that you have to repay kindness, but whatever. At least I should try. As.”

— Holly Black

306. “Like a stage magician, the con artist misdirects suspicion. While everyone’s watching for him to pull a rabbit out of a hat, he’s actually sawing a girl in half. You think he’s doing one trick when he’s actually doing another. You think that I’m dying, but I’m laughing at you.”

— Holly Black

307. “Knowledge and action are one and the same.”

— Holly Black

308. “Princess Elowyn whirls at the center of a circle of Larks. Her skin is a glittering gold, her hair the deep green of ivy. Beside her, a human boy plays the fiddle. Two more mortals accompany him less skillfully, but more joyfully, on ukuleles.”

— Holly Black

309. “It was good to be hugged. Even by a monster.”

— Holly Black

310. “I hereafter exile Jude Duarte to the mortal world until such time as she is pardoned by the crown. Until then, let her not step one foot in Faerie or forfeit her life.”

— Holly Black

311. “Hazel never cried. She was forged from iron; she never broke.”

— Holly Black

312. “I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstacy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they trash in your hands as though with an excess of passion.”

— Holly Black

313. “It is my belief that books are living things... And as living things, they need to be protected.”

— Holly Black

314. “We slept on mattresses stuffed with the soft seed-heads of dandelions.”

— Holly Black

315. “She had a way of making everyone around her feel as though every impossible thing was possible.”

— Holly Black

316. “Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins.”

— Holly Black

317. “He looks every inch a spy from the Court of Shadows, down to the sneaky smile pulling at the corner of his beautiful mouth.”

— Holly Black

318. “Karate-chopping ninjas in a mudslide?” Tamara gave Aaron and Call a dark look. “Could you guys try to lay low?”

— Holly Black

319. “I still feel the warm pressure of his fingers against my skin. Something is really wrong with me, to want what I hate, to want someone who despises me, even if he wants me, too. My only comfort is that he doesn’t know what I feel.”

— Holly Black

320. “We all want stupid things. That doesn’t mean we should have them.”

— Holly Black

321. “Down a path worn into the woods, past a stream and a hollowed-out log full of pill bugs and termites, was a glass coffin. It rested right on the ground, and in it slept a boy with horns on his head and ears as pointed as knives.”

— Holly Black

322. “Ah! A lady of mystery! My very favorite kind.”

— Holly Black

323. “Only out of his spilled blood can a great ruler rise.”

— Holly Black

324. “People like Aaron act all nice until suddenly they explode and banish some annoying geezer into the void.”

— Holly Black

325. “Let me look out for you. Let your enemies become mine.”

— Holly Black

326. “I’m not even a little bit dead.”

— Holly Black

327. “Oh, God, Call thought. Tamara’s father. And he’d just kissed Tamara. Was that why Mr. Rajavi was here? Don’t be totally ridiculous, said Aaron. Do you think he’s psychic or something? Kimiya was grounded for making out with Evil Overlord Alex – Tamara had said so. Mr. Rajavi had a well-established policy of not liking his children making out with Evil Overlords.”

— Holly Black

328. “Las tormentas son menos volubles de lo que son, los mares menos caprichosos.”

— Holly Black

329. “The Alkahest is gone. If he’s the one who got it, they’re not going to bother with prison. He’ll be dead as soon as they find him.”

— Holly Black

330. “He would make out with girls in front of her. He would make out with boys in front of her. He would wink at her from across rooms, daring her to criticize him.”

— Holly Black

331. “A king is a living symbol, a beating heart, a star upon which Elfhame’s future is written. Surely you have noticed that since his reign began, the isles are different. Storms come in faster. Colors are a bit more vivid, smells are sharper... When he becomes drunk, his subjects becomes tipsy without knowing why. When his blood falls, things grow.”

— Holly Black

332. “Absence diminishes little passions and increases great ones.”

— Holly Black

333. “If she was going to die, she might as well die sarcastic. She’d seen a lot of old movies, and that was definitely the way to go out.”

— Holly Black

334. “It will hurt. Pain makes you strong.”

— Holly Black

335. “They ran through the night together in a darkling fairy tale of blood and forests and snow, of girls with raven’s wing hair and rose-red lips and sharp teeth as white as milk.”

— Holly Black

336. “Jones looks like he wants to slug me, which is only subtly different from his usual way of looking at me like I’m a slug.”

— Holly Black

337. “To Ben, love was the flame in which he wanted to be reborn. He wanted to be remade by it.”

— Holly Black

338. “You’re going to get all the things you think you can’t have,” she says quietly, reaching out to rub red lipstick from my cheek. “You just don’t know it yet.”

— Holly Black

339. “He knew what he was, what depths of depravity and cruelty he had plumbed, what ambitions drove him. He prided himself on knowing those things – but that didn’t mean he needed anyone else to see them as well.”

— Holly Black

340. “I wanted to be in love like in the storybooks and songs and ballads. Love that hits you like a lightning bolt. And I’m sorry, because yeah, I get that you think I’m ridiculous. I get that you think I’m hilarious. I know, I get that you’re mocking me. I get how stupid I am, but at least I know.”

— Holly Black

341. “Some things exist whether you believe in them or not.”

— Holly Black

342. “I know I shouldn’t love it as I do, stolen as I am from the mortal world, my parents murdered. But I love it all the same.”

— Holly Black

343. “I thought you needed to be tougher. But I’ve been thinking that protecting somebody by hurting them before someone else gets the chance isn’t the kind of protecting that anybody wants.”

— Holly Black

344. “A girl like that, Grandad said, perfumes herself with ozone and metal filings.”

— Holly Black

345. “But if you didn’t believe in monsters, then how were you going to be able to keep safe from them?”

— Holly Black

346. “There’s nothing quite as funny as someone else’s misery – Cassel Sharpe.”

— Holly Black

347. “I hate that he knows what he’s doing and I don’t. I hate being vulnerable. I hate that I throw my head back, baring my throat. I hate the way I cling to him, the nails of one hand digging into his back, my thoughts splintering, 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

348. “He continues looking at me in this strange way, as though he’s never seen me before or as though he thought he might never see me again.”

— Holly Black

349. “I miss him, and the pain of it is a yawning chasm, one into which I yearn to let myself fall.”

— Holly Black

350. “Everyone danced – sweaty bodies packed tight, drunk with sound.”

— Holly Black