Top 500 Holly Black Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

404. “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

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

— Holly Black

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— 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. “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

412. “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

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

— Holly Black

414. “Instead, I try to imagine someone she might fall in love with. Maybe it will be a merrow, and he will give her the gift of breathing underwater and a crown of pearls and take her to his bed under the sea. Actually, that sounds amazing. Maybe I am making all the wrong choices.”

— Holly Black

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Holly Black

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Holly Black

423. “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

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

— Holly Black

425. “I hope Cardan misses me.”

— Holly Black

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Holly Black

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

437. “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

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

— Holly Black

439. “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

440. “Air all around him, there was air in the water, all elements were one, fire and earth, air and water. All are but one thing, not four, not two, and not three, but one. He.”

— Holly Black

441. “He picked up her purse from where it rested beside her and shook it gently. “In case you were concerned. All just as you left it.” She nodded. “Thanks. Although I guess whether I’ll ever get to use that marker is pretty up in the air right now.” “You should have let me eat her in that parking lot,” Gavriel said, raising his eyebrows.”

— Holly Black

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

— Holly Black

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Holly Black

448. “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

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

— Holly Black