Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “You’re yourself,” Tana said, grinning. “More purely yourself than anyone I know. And if you can’t see who that is anymore, then see yourself the way I see you.”

— Holly Black

302. “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

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

— Holly Black

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

308. “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

309. “There are dog people and cat people.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

317. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

322. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

326. “Poisonous jealousy thrummed through my veins.”

— Holly Black

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Holly Black

331. “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

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

— Holly Black

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Holly Black

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

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

— 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. “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

346. “Fairy tales are full of girls who wait, who endure, who suffer. Good girls. Obedient girls. Girls who crush nettles until their hands bleed. Girls who haul water for witches. Girls who wander through deserts or sleep in ashes or make homes for transformed brothers in the woods. Girls without hands, without eyes, without the power of speech, without any power at all. But then a prince rides up and sees the girl and finds her beautiful. Beautiful, not despite her suffering, but because of it.”

— Holly Black

347. “The problem with coming through something terrible and big is that afterward, you’re left feeling all the feelings that you shoved down and pushed away. For many long days, I have been terrified, and now, when I ought to be feeling great, what i want to do is hide under a table in the brugh with Cardan until i can finally convince myself he’s all right.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

349. “Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black