Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

305. “And if I never change back? If I’m not human enough anymore?” He smiled; she could feel it against her skin. “Then we’ll go hunt vampires together and you’ll drink their blood.” “The Lady or The Tiger,” she said, thinking of the drinking game she’d played at the farmhouse, thinking of the story that never ended, of a coin spinning without falling on heads or tails. “My lady, the tiger,” he told her, and got up to turn the camera back on.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

307. “Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins.”

— Holly Black

308. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

311. “I’m not a monster, I’d told her, back when I said I would never hurt Oak. But maybe being a monster was my calling.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

314. “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

315. “You’re like this leopard who’s pretending to be a house cat.”

— Holly Black

316. “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

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

— Holly Black

318. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

322. “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

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

— Holly Black

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Holly Black

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

337. “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

338. “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

339. “Val and Ruth had been friends forever, for so long that Val was used to being the overshadowed one, the “normal” one, the one who set up the witty one-liners, not the one who delivered them. She liked that role; it made her feel safe. Robin to Ruth’s Batman. Chewbaca to her Han Solo.”

— Holly Black

340. “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

341. “You whom I could not save Listen to me.” – CZESLAW MILOSZ, “Dedication.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

344. “People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.”

— Holly Black

345. “Yeah, Cardan should definitely trust you more. You seem really trustworthy. It’s not like you’re actually currently betraying him.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Holly Black

350. “It’s the thrill of leaping without being able to see the ground below you, right before you realise that’s called falling.”

— Holly Black