Top 280 Jay Kristoff Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Fear is never a choice. Never a choice. But letting it rule you is.”

— Jay Kristoff

152. “She is stubborn, and moves, even when it seems she cannot. But sometimes, as she crawls along, she cries slow, fat tears. And other times, she looks at her palm pad. And other times, she closes her eyes and meditates, or wishes, or simply grieves. But always, always, she crawls.”

— Jay Kristoff

153. “Never flinch,” she breathed. “Never fear.”

— Jay Kristoff

154. “Promises are for poets.”

— Jay Kristoff

155. “How many Mia’s had she helped create?”

— Jay Kristoff

156. “Thus, the greatest monsters get their way, she realized. By looking just like the rest of us.”

— Jay Kristoff

157. “Hurts, doesn’t it? When you find out the ones who gave you life are just as mortal and frail as the rest of us? That the world isn’t what you thought it was?”

— Jay Kristoff

158. “This is for me,” Mia whispered. “The me who never was. The me who lived in peace and married someone beautiful and perhaps held a daughter in her arms. The me who never knew the taste of blood, or the smell of poison, or the kiss of steel. The me you killed, just as surely as you killed the rest of them.”

— Jay Kristoff

159. “The Luminatii aren’t a tool of law and order in the Itreyan capital, gentlefriend. They are a tool of the status quo.”

— Jay Kristoff

160. “Looking out over the mezzanine to the endless shelves below, the girl couldn’t help but smile. She’d grown up inside books. No matter how dark life became, shutting out the hurt was as easy as opening a cover. A child of murdered parents and a failed rebellion, she’d still walked in the boots of scholars and warriors, queens and conquerors.”

— Jay Kristoff

161. “It’s hard to imagine, but even amid so much violence and chaos and loss, somehow the universe sometimes still manages to look beautiful.”

— Jay Kristoff

162. “Death is a promise we all must keep. Sooner or later.”

— Jay Kristoff

163. “A life without books is a life not lived.”

— Jay Kristoff

164. “Hearts only bruise. They never break.”

— Jay Kristoff

165. “Sometimes you don’t know you’ve crossed the line till you’re on the other side.”

— Jay Kristoff

166. “It has footnotes. What kind of wanker writes a novel with footnotes?”

— Jay Kristoff

167. “Say what you will about being fearless, but there’s only the finest line between bravery and idiocy.”

— Jay Kristoff

168. “When you take a person out of the world, you don’t just take them, do you? You take everything they were, too.”

— Jay Kristoff

169. “Good turn to you, gentlefriends. It’s lovely to see you again. I confess, I missed you in our time apart. And now, reunited, would that I could simply greet you with a smile, and let you be about the business of murder and revenge and occasional lashings of tastefully written smut.”

— Jay Kristoff

170. “Deviation’ or whatever you want to call it? That’s just another expression of it. You call it freakish. I call it incredible.”

— Jay Kristoff

171. “Grandpa said it’s always better to be shot at for who you are than hugged for who you aren’t.”

— Jay Kristoff

172. “I’ll do anything you ask, and everything you won’t.”

— Jay Kristoff

173. “But it’s a terrible thing, Dona Mia, when the ones who should love you best leave you for the wolves.”

— Jay Kristoff

174. “The blood you have in your veins? You’re strong enough for both of us.”

— Jay Kristoff

175. “It’s quite a thing, to watch a person slip from the potential of life into the finality of death. It’s another thing entirely to be the one who pushed. And for all Mercurio’s teachings, she was still a sixteen-year-old girl who’d just committed her first act of murder. Her.”

— Jay Kristoff

176. “This is her story, and that’s how it ends. “A republic in ashes.” That’s a good ending, Mercurio. Better than most get.”

— Jay Kristoff

177. “Even in our darkest moments, we have a choice, sweet Ana.”

— Jay Kristoff

178. “Una avalancha comienza con un guijarro. Un bosque con una semilla. Y solo se necesita una palabra para hacer que el mundo entero se detenga y escuche. Todo lo que necesitas es la palabra correcta.”

— Jay Kristoff

179. “So much wealth held in so few palms. A kingdom of the blind, built on the backs of the bruised and the broken.”

— Jay Kristoff

180. “Tric’s footsteps faded in the hall. Mia stood there in the dark. Shoulders slumped. Head bowed. Alone.”

— Jay Kristoff

181. “But those who stand for nothing die for the same. And if you stand only for yourself, you fall alone.”

— Jay Kristoff

182. “No up. No down. No sky. No ground. Just endless dark shot through with tiny spears of sunlight older than you and your entire species stacked end to end. You want to feel small? Spend sixty seconds in a Cyclone’s cockpit, chum. Look out at the nothing and feel it looking back. Then you know exactly how much you add up to.”

— Jay Kristoff

183. “Brave in a way he’d never been. Dark and bloodstained and scarred to the bone. She had every reason in the world to be nothing but rage and hatred and misery. But he knew, as much as she tried to hide it, she hadn’t let life turn her cold. She loved with a heart as fierce as lions. Gave in a way that left her bleeding, but never broken. Because even with all she’d lost, all she’d sacrificed, all the hurt heaped upon her shoulders, she’d still come back.”

— Jay Kristoff

184. “Problem with being a librarian is there’s some lessons you just can’t learn from books.”

— Jay Kristoff

185. “Our scars are just gifts from our enemies,” Ashlinn whispered into her mouth. “Reminding us they weren’t good enough to kill us.”

— Jay Kristoff

186. “Why should what’s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It’s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it’s all just food for worms.”

— Jay Kristoff

187. “Your past is stone, your future is clay.”

— Jay Kristoff

188. “My mother teases my father, saying he can only create people, while authors can create entire worlds.”

— Jay Kristoff

189. “Where do you keep the heart that’s supposed to be inside your chest?”

— Jay Kristoff

190. “This is a sensationally bad idea, Ash.” “So you said. About twenty times now.” “You remember what Marielle did to Hush?” “Maw’s teeth, Corvere. When my da got tortured in the Thorn Towers of Elai, they chopped his bollocks off and fed them to the scabdogs. What’s your excuse?”

— Jay Kristoff

191. “And within the computer’s innards, a spreading cancer. A self-replicating corruption. A B-pop mutiny of bass and drum and oscillating frequency. Inane quasi poetry glorifying a pointless act of intimacy.”

— Jay Kristoff

192. “Silver at her throat. Stone at her feet. Iron in her heart.”

— Jay Kristoff

193. “He’d been kind to her in a world where kind only came at a price. He’d given her a roof when most creeps only ever offered a bed.”

— Jay Kristoff

194. “Two years is a long time. I walked a long way.”

— Jay Kristoff

195. “Do you remember that time we were acolytes and you talked me out of doing something I desperately wanted by appealing to my sensible side?” The boy tilted his head. “... NO.” “Me either.”

— Jay Kristoff

196. “Nothing is where you start. Own nothing. Know nothing. Be nothing.’ ‘Why would I want to do that?’ The old man crushed out his cigarillo on the boards between them. His smile made her smile in return. ‘Because then you can do anything.”

— Jay Kristoff

197. “But even the moon loved our girl too much to let her die for long.”

— Jay Kristoff

198. “The marrowborn legate to whom the carriage belonged stuck his head out the window to see what all the fuss was, found a girl in a shredded evening gown where his driver should’ve been. As he opened his mouth to protest, she turned and looked at him, bloodstained skin and narrowed eyes, a cat made of what might have been shadows perched on her shoulder. The man pulled his head back into the carriage without a word.”

— Jay Kristoff

199. “And though you left me shattered, that does not make me broken. The pieces of me you left behind are sharp as knives. Sharp as truth. So hear it now, and know.”

— Jay Kristoff

200. “I denied death for you.”

— Jay Kristoff