Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “He had green eyes so clear and bright that they made you think of poisonous drinks or maybe mouthwash.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Holly Black

409. “Perhaps you could just allow yourself to be rescued,” Cardan says. “For once.”

— Holly Black

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Holly Black

414. “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

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

— Holly Black

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “I hope Cardan misses me.”

— Holly Black

423. “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

424. “You’re a good little murderer, Dulcamara said.”

— Holly Black

425. “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

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

— Holly Black

427. “She went to all the parties and kissed all the boys, shoring up fun against despair, against the suffocating terror that loomed over her.”

— Holly Black

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

433. “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

434. “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

435. “Once, she made a boy come out of his house and kiss her under the streetlight. It was her first kiss. She thinks it was probably his, too. She never told him and she never, ever will.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

437. “I step out of my second life the same way I stepped out of my first, holding too few things and with great uncertainty about what will happen next.”

— Holly Black

438. “Automotones, escaped.”

— Holly Black

439. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

Featured in: Romance Quotes

443. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

447. “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

448. “You’re young, but you’re ambitious in the way that perhaps only the young can be.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

450. “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