Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Holly Black

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Holly Black

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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. “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

414. “I hope Cardan misses me.”

— Holly Black

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Holly Black

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “She should tell him no, but instead she seemed to be running toward trouble, leaving no stone unturned, no boy unkissed, no crush abandoned, and no bad idea unembraced.”

— Holly Black

424. “This house feels unfamiliar and disturbingly full of possibilities.”

— Holly Black

425. “Quests are supposed to change us.”

— Holly Black

426. “He had green eyes so clear and bright that they made you think of poisonous drinks or maybe mouthwash.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

436. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

440. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

444. “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

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

— Holly Black

446. “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

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

— Holly Black

448. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

449. “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

450. “Now that I’ve started touching her, I can’t seem to stop. Like somehow the language of my hands will tell her all the things I don’t know how to say out loud.”

— Holly Black