Top 500 Leigh Bardugo Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Every act of violence was deliberate, and every favor came with enough strings attached to stage a puppet show.”

— Leigh Bardugo

202. “Zoya was surprised to find she liked seeing Alina’s name on churches, liked hearing it spoken in prayers. Ravka had given too much of its love to men like the Darkling, the Apparat, even the Lantsov kings. They owed a little of it to an orphan girl with no dress sense.”

— Leigh Bardugo

203. “So why do your eyes keep searching the crowd for her?” “They do not,” Matthias protested. She had to laugh at the ferocity of his scowl. He drew a finger through a pile of crumbs. “Nina is everything you say. It’s too much.” “Mmm,” Inej murmured, taking a sip from her mug. “Maybe you’re just not enough.”

— Leigh Bardugo

204. “I trade in information, Geels, the things men do when they think no one is looking. Shame holds more value than coin ever can.”

— Leigh Bardugo

205. “I just know there’s no way to live without pain – no matter how long or short your life is. People let you down. You get hurt and do damage in return.”

— Leigh Bardugo

206. “Wind in your hair, sea spray on your skin. The cold of the living.”

— Leigh Bardugo

207. “Being a leader means someone is always watching you.”

— Leigh Bardugo

208. “When they backed you in a corner, you cut a hole in the roof.”

— Leigh Bardugo

209. “One minute he made her blush and the next he made her want to commit murder.”

— Leigh Bardugo

210. “Curse you and all your Saints,′ he said to no one at all, then realized he was smiling.”

— Leigh Bardugo

211. “Someone to mourn me... No grave... for them to desecrate.”

— Leigh Bardugo

212. “What you want and what the world needs are not always in accord.”

— Leigh Bardugo

213. “They fear you as I once feared you,” he said. “As you once feared me. We are all someone’s monster, Nina.”

— Leigh Bardugo

214. “Battles are often lost because people don’t know which war they’re fighting.”

— Leigh Bardugo

215. “Watch yourself, Nikolai,” Mal said softly. ” Princes bleed just like other men.”

— Leigh Bardugo

216. “You are owed nothing. Steel is earned.”

— Leigh Bardugo

217. “Chaos will come and I will be its master.”

— Leigh Bardugo

218. “The sun was out for once, and Inej had turned her face to it. Her eyes were shut, her oil-black lashes fanned over her cheeks. The harbor wind had lifted her dark hair, and for a moment Kaz was a boy again, sure that there was magic in this world.”

— Leigh Bardugo

219. “I had spared the stag’s life. The power of that life belonged to me as surely as it belonged to the man who had taken it.”

— Leigh Bardugo

220. “When the coffers are empty and their bellies growl, even good men turn bad.”

— Leigh Bardugo

221. “But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.”

— Leigh Bardugo

222. “It’s hard to keep track of all your wisdom.”

— Leigh Bardugo

223. “If we don’t survive this night, I will die unafraid, Kaz. Can you say the same?”

— Leigh Bardugo

224. “There is no safe place. There is no haven. Not for us.”

— Leigh Bardugo

225. “Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay.”

— Leigh Bardugo

226. “This was his soul made flesh, the truth of him laid bare in the blazing sun, shorn of mystery and shadow.”

— Leigh Bardugo

227. “I wonder sometimes how much we really understand our own gifts.”

— Leigh Bardugo

228. “Listen to me,” he hissed, his face inches from Oomen’s. “You have two choices. You tell me what I want to know, and we drop you at our next port with your pockets full of enough coin to get you sewn up and buy you passage back to Kerch. Or I take the other eye, and I repeat this conversation with a blind man.”

— Leigh Bardugo

229. “We are not witches. We are practitioners of the Small Science. We keep this country and this kingdom safe.”

— Leigh Bardugo

230. “Why don’t you just admit that you wanted to belong to him? Why don’t you admit that part of you still does?”

— Leigh Bardugo

231. “I was a living star. I was combustion. I was a new sun born to shatter air and eat the earth.”

— Leigh Bardugo

232. “Nina screamed, a howl that tore from the black space where her heart had beat only moments before. She searched for his pulse, for the light and force that had been Matthias.”

— Leigh Bardugo

233. “Nina, I am with you because you let me be with you. There is no greater honor than to stand by your side.”

— Leigh Bardugo

234. “I’ve waged the war you forced me to, Alina,” said the Darkling. “If you hadn’t run from me, the Second Army would still be intact. All those Grisha would still be alive. Your tracker would be safe and happy with his regiment. When will it be enough? When will you let me stop?”

— Leigh Bardugo

235. “I have loved you all my life, Mal. There is no end to our story.”

— Leigh Bardugo

236. “She had her aim now, her heart had direction, and though it hurt to know the path led away from him, she could endure it.”

— Leigh Bardugo

237. “Everything is a negotiation with you, Brekker. You probably bartered your way out of the womb.”

— Leigh Bardugo

238. “Sometimes our heroes don’t make it to the end.”

— Leigh Bardugo

239. “In that moment, he wished things might have been different. That he might not die tomorrow. That he could be led by his heart instead of duty. Because Zoya was not kind and she was not easy. But she was already a queen.”

— Leigh Bardugo

240. “Crows remember human faces. They remember the people who feed them, who are kind to them. And the people who wrong them too. They don’t forget. They tell each other who to look after and who to watch out for.”

— Leigh Bardugo

241. “The heat of the incinerator wrapped around Inej like a living thing, a desert dragon in his den, hiding from the ice, waiting for her. She knew her body’s limits, and she knew she had no more to give. She’d made a bad wager. It was as simple as that. The autumn leaf might cling to its branch, but it was already dead. The only question was when it would fall.”

— Leigh Bardugo

242. “Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live.”

— Leigh Bardugo

243. “He was a collection of hard lines and tailored edges – sharp jaw, lean build, wool coat snug across his shoulders.”

— Leigh Bardugo

244. “But maybe being brave didn’t mean being unafraid.”

— Leigh Bardugo

245. “It’s simply a question of finding the right incentive. Pauper or prince, every man can be bought.”

— Leigh Bardugo

246. “For my country,” she said. “For my people. For every child you put to the pyre. Reap what you’ve sown, Jarl Brum.”

— Leigh Bardugo

247. “This isn’t a job for trained soldiers and spies. It’s a job for thugs and thieves.”

— Leigh Bardugo

248. “He didn’t deserve peace and he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but if he was going to die today, maybe the one thing he’d earned was the memory of her – brighter than anything he would ever have a right to – to take with him to the other side.”

— Leigh Bardugo

249. “Sometimes the trick to getting the best of a situation was just to wait. If you didn’t like the weather, you didn’t rush into the storm – you waited until it changed. You found a way to keep from getting wet.”

— Leigh Bardugo

250. “It’s shame that lines my pockets, shame that keeps the Barrel teeming with fools ready to put on a mask just so they can have what they want with no one the wiser for it. We can endure all kinds of pain. It’s shame that eats men whole.”

— Leigh Bardugo