Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “His mouth curls into a smile. His eyes shine with wicked intent. “Look at them all, your subjects. A shame not a one knows who their true ruler is.”

— Holly Black

402. “I don’t know,” Call said. He was starting to worry that there weren’t any good guys. Just people with longer or shorter Evil Overlord lists.”

— Holly Black

403. “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. The memory of his mouth on mine shimmers in the air between us.”

— Holly Black

404. “Looking back, Val knew she had a habit of trusting too much, being too passive, too willing to believe the best of others and the worst of herself.”

— Holly Black

405. “Hazel kissed boys for all kinds of reasons – because they were cute, because she was a little drunk, because she was bored, because they let her, because it was fun, because they looked lonely, because it blotted out her fears for a while, because she wasn’t sure how many kisses she had left.”

— Holly Black

406. “Secrets lie in the entrails of things, in the dregs.”

— Holly Black

407. “I think of Madoc, dozing away upstairs, all his dreams of murder. I think of Oriana and Oak being forced apart for years. I think of Cardan and how he will hate me. I think of what it means to make myself the villain of the piece. “For the next full minute, I command you not to move,” I whisper back.”

— Holly Black

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Holly Black

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “She came out of sleep like a thunderclap – waking from dreams so deep and dark that she couldn’t remember anything but dirt and hands pulling her down into graves with cities inside them.”

— Holly Black

415. “The row of dolls watched her impassively from the bookshelf, their tea party propriety almost certainly offended.”

— Holly Black

416. “For a moment, Cardan just stares at me with stupid, crow-black eyes. Then one corner of his mouth curls. “Oh,” he says. “You’re going to regret doing that.”

— Holly Black

417. “Then, once the window was open, it would have been easy to forget to close it. There was still the garlic, after all, still the holy water on the lintels. Things like this happened in Europe, in places like Belgium, where the streets teemed with vampires and the shops didn’t open until after dark. Not here. Not in Tana’s town, where there hadn’t been a single attack in more than five years.”

— Holly Black

418. “Books were something that happened to readers. Readers were the victims of books.”

— Holly Black

419. “It occurs to me that maybe desire isn’t something overindulging helps. Maybe it is not unlike mithridatism; maybe I took a killing dose when I should have been poisoning myself slowly, one kiss at a time.”

— Holly Black

420. “His voice had a faint trace of an accent she couldn’t place – one that made her pretty sure he was no local kid infected the night before.”

— Holly Black

421. “If you stop,” she says, “I will also kill you.”

— Holly Black

422. “It is my belief that books are living things.”

— Holly Black

423. “Magic is seldom so convenient as to conform to our preferences.”

— Holly Black

424. “Little brother,” Balekin says without waiting to be acknowledged. He wears the chained cuffs on his wrists as though they are bracelets, as though they add to his status instead of marking him as a prisoner.”

— Holly Black

425. “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

426. “You and your sister are very dear to each other. To show your regard, you give each other lovely bouquets of lies.”

— Holly Black

427. “I will repay him, although it seems I will have much to repay him for. I will make him proud of me. Everyone else, I will make very, very sorry.”

— Holly Black

428. “Gazing at her for a long moment with something like horror, as though he was seeing her for the first time, he spoke. “You are more dangerous than daybreak.”

— Holly Black

429. “I had a tutor who wanted me to believe that mercy is a kind of sorrow and that since evil is the motive of sorrow, evil is also the motive of mercy. I thought that my tutor was old and cruel, and maybe he was – but now I think he was also right.”

— Holly Black

430. “I think we should consider our roles as monarchs to be largely decorative. It would be better for the low Courts and the solitary Folk to work things out on their own.”

— Holly Black

431. “Dead or not, I have come for his heart and I will have it.”

— Holly Black

432. “Yeah, the whole family knows. It’s no big deal. One night at dinner I said, ‘Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.’ It was easier for her to understand that way.”

— Holly Black

433. “One night you will ask me for something I cannot give.”

— Holly Black

434. “I hope Cardan misses me.”

— Holly Black

435. “And if it stings a little that he admires me primarily for my ruthlessness, well, I suppose there should be some comfort that he admires me at all.”

— Holly Black

436. “I need to make her realize that even terrible memories are better than weird gaps or the hollowness of your feelings not making sense.”

— Holly Black

437. “Call stroked his head. Alex laughed. “Stupid animal.” Tamara bristled. “Don’t talk about Havoc that way.” “Who says I was talking about Havoc?”

— Holly Black

438. “We have about three hours of homework a night, and our evening study period is only two hours, so if you want to spend the break at half-past-nine not freaking out, you have to cram. I’m not sure that the picture of the wide-eyed zombie girl biting out the brains of senior douchebag James Page is part of Sam’s homework, bit if it is, his physics teacher is awesome.”

— Holly Black

439. “What if the way I am is the way I am? What if, when everything else is different, I’m not?”

— Holly Black

440. “His song began to change. It grew softer, sweeter, like the morning after a long cry, when your head still hurt but your heart was no longer broken.”

— Holly Black

441. “Some might think of him as a strong draught, burning the back of one’s throat, but invigorating all the same. You might beg to differ. So long as you’re begging, he doesn’t mind a bit.”

— Holly Black

442. “He just looked like a pretty boy, tall and lanky. She thought again of the crumpled paper in her purse and of him, caged beneath a cemetery. How long had he been there? How long had he looked just as he did now? A hundred years? Two hundred? Could he even remember the press of time? Maybe having stepped outside of it would drive anybody crazy.”

— Holly Black

443. “It turned our that no matter how far you fall, there’s always a lower place.”

— Holly Black

444. “We’re not going to be fine, Tana. We’re never going to be fine ever again.”

— Holly Black

445. “If you don’t know why you’re apologizing, your apology probably sucks.”

— Holly Black

446. “She fell asleep like a flame being extinguished.”

— Holly Black

447. “Just because I am bitter about romance doesn’t mean everyone else needs to be.”

— Holly Black

448. “They looked absurdly gorgeous, glowing from the television like fallen angels. Even from the beginning, that was a problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.”

— Holly Black

449. “Scared, silly-scared, scared, scared, scared,” Lutie chanted against her neck.”

— Holly Black

450. “My head is pounding. I wish the mints were aspirin.”

— Holly Black