Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.”

— Holly Black

352. “I liked you, you know,” he says. “I like you still.” For a moment, I wonder what would happen if I hauled off and punched him.”

— Holly Black

353. “I can learn to live with guilt. I don’t care about being good.”

— Holly Black

354. “So it’s not as bad as it looks?” Call ventured. “Oh, no,” she told him. “It’s just as bad as it looks. But I’m very, very good at my job.”

— Holly Black

355. “Nothing can happen more beautiful than death – Walt Whitman.”

— Holly Black

356. “Everything was strange and beautiful and swollen with possibilities.”

— Holly Black

357. “Call wasn’t sure what it meant that he’d gone full Evil Overlord on Jasper but still couldn’t manage to impress him.”

— Holly Black

358. “I forbid you from speaking aloud about your service to me. I forbid you from putting it into writing or into song. You will never tell anyone of the Roach. You will never tell anyone of any of my spies. You will never reveal their secrets, their meeting places, their safe houses. So long as I live, you will obey this.”

— Holly Black

359. “In general, her family wasn’t very good at talking about important stuff. And of all of them, she was the least good at it. When she tried, it felt like all the chains on all her imagined safes and trunks started rattling.”

— Holly Black

360. “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

361. “Really it was a pretty good talk. About the best I could expect from my sociopath amnesiac jerk of an older brother.”

— Holly Black

362. “Do you know what makes people love one another? Well, no one else does, either. But scientists study it, and there’s all this bizarre stuff about pheromones and facial symmetry and the circumstances under which you first met. People are weird. Our bodies are weird. Maybe I can’t help being attracted to her the same way flies can’t help being attracted to carnivorous plants.”

— Holly Black

363. “Lords and ladies who walk unseen, lords and ladies all in green, three times I stamp upon the earth... ” Hazel hesitated and then gave the only reason she could think of why the Folk might grant her entry to their revel.“Let me in for the sake of mirth.”

— Holly Black

364. “Librarians are hot. They have knowledge and power over their domain... It is no coincidence how many librarians are portrayed as having a passionate interior, hidden by a cool layer of reserve. Aren’t books like that? On the shelf, their calm covers belie the intense experience of reading one. Reading inflames the soul. Now, what sort of person would be the keeper of such books?”

— Holly Black

365. “Now, if anyone in the Refectory bothers you, you can chop off their head, Aaron thought cheerfully.”

— Holly Black

366. “When it’s done, we’ll be like brothers,” said the devil. “I already have a brother,” Gavriel slurred. “He’s dead.” The devil loomed over him, his grin widening to show off sharp teeth. “As am I.” Gavriel opened his mouth to shout, but drunk as he was, he began to laugh instead.”

— Holly Black

367. “He runs to the sink to spit it out. I grin. There’s nothing quite as funny as someone else’s misery.”

— Holly Black

368. “Protecting somebody by hurting them before someone else gets the chance isn’t the kind of protecting that anybody wants.”

— Holly Black

369. “It was a voice so full of emotion that it sounded like no emotion at all.”

— Holly Black

370. “Death’s favorites don’t die.”

— Holly Black

371. “No amount of takeout Chinese food or politeness ought to make me forget exactly who and what I am dealing with.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

373. “There’s nothing like a gunshot to make you the life of the party.”

— Holly Black

374. “Holy moly. – Jasper.”

— Holly Black

375. “The Folk doubtlessly learned this lesson long ago. They do not need to deceive humans. Humans will deceive themselves.”

— Holly Black

376. “The job is not to get caught.”

— Holly Black

377. “Do you seek out peril? One would think that years of being a mortal would have made you more aware of mortality.”

— Holly Black

378. “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

379. “No fire at all.”

— Holly Black

380. “He attacks again, his sword a silvery fish darting through the sea of the night.”

— Holly Black

381. “And now she was sixteen and felt like she had no imagination left.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

383. “It turns out that having kissed someone, the possibility of kissing hangs over everything, no matter how terrible an idea it was the first time.”

— Holly Black

384. “For what we want most, we will take almost any chance.”

— Holly Black

385. “They loved him because he was a prince and a faerie and magical and you were supposed to love princes and faeries and magical people.”

— Holly Black

386. “Sometimes I go down and stare at it, trying to see my parents in the tide lines of dried blood. I want to feel something, something besides a vague queasiness. I want to feel more, but every time I look at it, I feel less.”

— Holly Black

387. “You are the best kind of killer, Cassel Sharpe, the kind that never has blood on his hands. The kind that never has to sicken at the sight of what he’s done, or come to like it too much.”

— Holly Black

388. “Having a heart is terrible, but you need one anyway.”

— Holly Black

389. “Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but she wasn’t going to.”

— Holly Black

390. “I’m not afraid,” Zacharov says, still looking at Anton. “It takes guts to kill a man with your hands. You don’t have the balls.”

— Holly Black

391. “There had been plenty of books and films romanticizing vampires over the last century. It was only a matter of time before a vampire started romanticizing himself.”

— Holly Black

392. “You’re mortal,” he informs me. In his other hand, he’s carrying an empty goblet, tipped over absently, as though he’s forgotten he still carries it. “It’s not safe for you here. Especially if you go around stabbing everyone.”

— Holly Black

393. “Ah.” He sat down on the couch, looking stunned with lack of sleep. “And so you came here in the middle of the night?”

— Holly Black

394. “Madoc described fighting as a lot of things, as a game of strategy played at speed, as a dance, but right now it feels like a argument. Like an argument where she’s keeping me too busy defending myself to score any points.”

— Holly Black

395. “Then Ivan and Marya Morevna built a pyre and burned Koschei until he was ash. And then they lived happily, visiting each of Ivan’s sisters and their bird-husbands, all of whom declared that Ivan did the right thing to risk so much for a woman as beautiful and fierce as Marya Morevna.” “If she was so fierce, how come she didn’t just save herself?” Tana asked.”

— Holly Black

396. “Remember what your father said about magic, boy. It’ll cost you everything.”

— Holly Black

397. “When I met Eldred, he rode up on a milk-white steed, and all the imaginings of my life were as dust and ashes.”

— Holly Black

398. “We all have things inside ourselves we can’t kill,′ I say, not sure which part of me would be better off dead: this monster self, or the normal one who wants nothing more than a little place on a little planet with his friends, the one who will have to live with being a killer.”

— Holly Black

399. “I think you impressed him with the sheer force of your stupidity.”

— Holly Black

400. “I was a fool”, I say, because i might as well admit it. ” I gave up the bird in my hand for two in the bush.”

— Holly Black