Top 500 Leigh Bardugo Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “I don’t reserve my friendship for perfect people.”

— Leigh Bardugo

252. “You see, some people are born with a piece of night inside, and that hollow place can never be filled – not with all the good food or sunshine in the world. That emptiness cannot be banished, and so some days we wake with the feeling of the wind blowing through, and we must simply endure it as the boy did.”

— Leigh Bardugo

253. “It’s still the same heart, Mal. It’s still yours.”

— Leigh Bardugo

254. “Pekka Rollins had lured them with a warm fire and the promise of the life they’d lost. And that was what destroyed you in the end: the longing for something you could never have.”

— Leigh Bardugo

255. “Zoya stared up at Nina in wonder. “You’re alive,” she said. Her gaze slid to Matthias, thrashing like the biggest, angriest butterfly ever pinned to a page. “And you’ve made a new friend.”

— Leigh Bardugo

256. “He has served countless kings, faked countless deaths, bided his time, waiting for you.”

— Leigh Bardugo

257. “Sometimes,” said Kaz, “a proper thief doesn’t just take. He leaves something behind.”

— Leigh Bardugo

258. “I’m a prince, Alina. I can’t afford to be myself.”

— Leigh Bardugo

259. “If you write, you’re a writer.”

— Leigh Bardugo

260. “They’d come to the Ice Court scurrying like rats. Live or die, they were going out like an army.”

— Leigh Bardugo

261. “There were always excuses for why girls died.”

— Leigh Bardugo

262. “How many times have you told me you’re a monster? So be a monster. Be the thing they all fear when they close their eyes at night.”

— Leigh Bardugo

263. “Even better men can be bested.”

— Leigh Bardugo

264. “That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.”

— Leigh Bardugo

265. “She’d shown him in a thousand ways that she was honorable and strong and generous and very human, maybe even more vividly human than anyone he’d ever known. And if she was, then Grisha weren’t inherently evil. They were like anyone else – full of the potential to do great good, and also great harm. To ignore that would make Matthias the monster.”

— Leigh Bardugo

266. “Magic doesn’t require beauty,’ she said. ‘Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.”

— Leigh Bardugo

267. “We pretend the pain isn’t there, that we are made of scars instead of wounds.”

— Leigh Bardugo

268. “She was the Queen of Mourning, and in its depths, she would never drown.”

— Leigh Bardugo

269. “You don’t ask for forgiveness, Kaz. You earn it.”

— Leigh Bardugo

270. “What is a mortal king to a queen who can summon storms?”

— Leigh Bardugo

271. “The world was made of miracles, unexpected earthquakes, storms that came from nowhere and might reshape a continent.”

— Leigh Bardugo

272. “The problem with wanting,” he whispered, his mouth trailing along my jaw until it hovered over my lips, “is that it makes us weak.”

— Leigh Bardugo

273. “I,” she said, planting a hand on her hip, “am a delicate flower.”

— Leigh Bardugo

274. “Women don’t want to be seduced. They want to be seen and listened to. You can’t do either of those things if you’re thinking up strategies on how to win her over.”

— Leigh Bardugo

275. “Put on your pretty clothes and wait for the next kiss, the next kind word. Wait for the stag. Wait for the collar. Wait to be made into a murderer and a slave.”

— Leigh Bardugo

276. “You don’t win by running one game.”

— Leigh Bardugo

277. “I’m not sure why I began this,” she admitted. “But I know why I have to finish. I know why fate brought me here, why it placed me in the path of this prize.”

— Leigh Bardugo

278. “Speak, Nazyalensky. When you purse your lips like that, you look like you’ve made love to a lemon.”

— Leigh Bardugo

279. “Her voice had brought him back from the dark; it had been the tether he gripped and used to drag himself back to some semblance of sanity.”

— Leigh Bardugo

280. “Eli’s long fingers cupped her face, traced the nape of her neck, kept her still, as if he needed to give her every bit of his attention, as if he could learn her like a language, plot her like a course. Eli kissed Gracie like she was a song and he was determined to hear every note.”

— Leigh Bardugo

281. “We all have spaces we keep blank.”

— Leigh Bardugo

282. “Do you ask your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe? Your power serves you because that is it’s purpose, because it cannot help but serve you.”

— Leigh Bardugo

283. “You move forward, and when you falter, you get up. And when you can’t, you let us carry you. You let me carry you.”

— Leigh Bardugo

284. “With a start, I realized that the room smelled like him. I had never even noticed that he had a scent. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply. What was it? The crisp edge of a winter wind. Bare branches. The smell of absence, the smell of night.”

— Leigh Bardugo

285. “The age of Grisha power is coming to an end.”

— Leigh Bardugo

286. “For the briefest moment, Ulla despised Signy, as we can only hate those who rescue us from loneliness.”

— Leigh Bardugo

287. “His knuckles brushed against her skin and lightning cracked through him, left him paralyzed, rooted to the earth. His heart should not be making that sound.”

— Leigh Bardugo

288. “My king lies bleeding. I am his subject and his soldier, and I come to fight for him.”

— Leigh Bardugo

289. “She would have her ship and he would have his city.”

— Leigh Bardugo

290. “We all die,” he said as he jogged off to retrieve his kill. “Not everyone dies for a reason.”

— Leigh Bardugo

291. “You see, every man is a safe, a vault of secrets and longings. Now, there are those who take the brute’s way, but I prefer a gentler approach- the right pressure applied at the right moment, in the right place. It’s a delicate thing.”

— Leigh Bardugo

292. “A friend of mine liked to tell me that women love flowers. He had many flirtations, but he never found a wife. Do you know why? Because women may love flowers, but only one woman loves the scent of gardenias in late summer that remind her of her grandmother’s porch. Only one woman loves apple blossoms in a blue cup. Only one woman loves wild geraniums.”

— Leigh Bardugo

293. “How many rules have you broken since you met me? How many laws? They won’t be the last. Nothing about us will ever be proper,” she said. She tilted her face up to his. So close now it was as if they were already touching. “Not the way we met. Not the life we lead. And not the way we kiss.”

— Leigh Bardugo

294. “Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get?”

— Leigh Bardugo

295. “If you ever cared about me at all, don’t follow.”

— Leigh Bardugo

296. “Innocence was a luxury.”

— Leigh Bardugo

297. “He was a king who had only begun to make mistakes. He was a soldier for whom the war would never be over. He was a bastard left alone in the woods. And he was not afraid to die this day.”

— Leigh Bardugo

298. “It felt like something that was meant to be kept secret, a new seed that might grow to something extraordinary if it wasn’t forced to bloom too soon.”

— Leigh Bardugo

299. “A few weeks, maybe a month,” he said as he ran the wet cloth under his arms and the hard planes of his chest, water trickling down his torso. For Saints’ sake, Inej thought as her cheeks heated. She’d lost most of her modesty during her time with the Menagerie, but really, there were limits. What would Kaz say if she suddenly stripped down and started washing herself in front of him? He’d probably tell me not to drip on the desk, she thought with a scowl.”

— Leigh Bardugo

300. “Beware of power. There is no amount of it that can make them love you.”

— Leigh Bardugo