Top 70 Tracy Deonn Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Have more than you show, speak less than you know.”

— Tracy Deonn

2. “Wishes are the dangerous mind games we play with ourselves. The only way to win is not to play.”

— Tracy Deonn

3. “But grief isn’t a competition. It’s not an identical pain that we all meet one day when death finds us. It’s a monster, personalized by our love and memories to devour us just so. Grief is suffering, tailored.”

— Tracy Deonn

4. “Don’t make your life about the loss. Make it about the love.”

— Tracy Deonn

5. “Sorry to interrupt, my liege! Please, proceed with thy gentle tonguing!”

— Tracy Deonn

6. “Forever: We’ll talk later is not the same as We’ll never talk again.”

— Tracy Deonn

7. “No one wants to hear the real answers. What the Sorry for Your Loss Crowd wants is to feel good about asking the questions.”

— Tracy Deonn

8. “My mother’s life has stopped. Shouldn’t everything and everyone stop living too? – Legenborn.”

— Tracy Deonn

9. “No other Merlin can protect you like I can, because no other Merlin feels about you the way I do. I want you to be happy. Not because of a spell, but because so very many things would break and go dark if you weren’t in the world. Myself included.”

— Tracy Deonn

10. “Two faults. My race and my gender. But they are not faults. They are strength. And I am more than this man can comprehend.”

— Tracy Deonn

11. “But that’s the thing. The Legendborn legacy isn’t power; it’s violence.”

— Tracy Deonn

12. “Power is one thing; control is another.”

— Tracy Deonn

13. “Where Excalibur slept, I stand. In this place, I am the blade.”

— Tracy Deonn

14. “Who’s the literary nerd? The quoter or the one who recognizes the quote?”

— Tracy Deonn

15. “The most important thing you can do in this world, the most necessary thing, is to survive it. You can’t do anything for anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself first.”

— Tracy Deonn

16. “Men in robes playing god.”

— Tracy Deonn

17. “You are my king now, cariad.”

— Tracy Deonn

18. “Because death breaks out connection... death is not a thread. it is the sharp cut that severs us. Death separates us from one another, and yet holds us close. As deeply as we hate it, it love us more.”

— Tracy Deonn

19. “Love is a powerful thing, more powerful than blood, although both run through us like a river.”

— Tracy Deonn

20. “This boy is not part of the plan. Not the beginning, middle, or anywhere in between.”

— Tracy Deonn

21. “I listen to these people I don’t know use the past tense about my mother, the person who brought me into this world and created my present. They are past-tensing my heart – my whole beating, bleeding, torn heart – right in front of me.”

— Tracy Deonn

22. “Sometimes a crime is an act of heroism.”

— Tracy Deonn

23. “They that would be a leader, let them be a bridge.”

— Tracy Deonn

24. “Each leap into nothingness, each hovering moment before the fall, call to spark a wild yearning inside my chest.”

— Tracy Deonn

25. “Just know, Briana Matthews,” he says, “that you are worth this and more.”

— Tracy Deonn

26. “We ran... so you would not have to.”

— Tracy Deonn

27. “Piggyback.” “Excuse me?” “You heard me.” “Like that movie – ” “Shut up.” “Churlish.” “Arrogant.”

— Tracy Deonn

28. “When he looks up, his sapphire-black eyes and kiss-swollen lips pull me in so wholly I feel like I’m falling into all that he is and all we’ll become. He sinks his teeth deep into his bottom lip and shakes his head in wonder. “You and me, B,” he murmurs. He trails light kisses along my jaw between his words. “We can make things better. Make it good. Together.” I tip my head against the door and think of forever.”

— Tracy Deonn

29. “Grief does strange things to people’s minds. This I know. One morning a couple of weeks after my mother died, my dad said he thought he could smell her cheesy grits cooking on the stove – my favorite and my mother’s specialty. Once, I heard her humming down the hall from my bedroom. Something so mundane and simple, so regular and small, that for a moment, the prior weeks were just a nightmare, and I was awake now and she was alive. Death moves faster than brains do.”

— Tracy Deonn

30. “What truly ties us together is not blood but pain. When we love someone and lose them, that loss imprints itself on everyone else we love too.”

— Tracy Deonn

31. “Hugging my mother in death feels like my magic in life.”

— Tracy Deonn

32. “For a moment, the three of us stare at one another in wordless comprehension. I look between the two of them – a fallen angel and a king, the dark and the light, and feel a deep, churning thrill at what I’ve done. What we’ve done. This is how it will be now. Oaths between us. Bound to each other. Forever.”

— Tracy Deonn

33. “Someone I care about is alive but hurt. Someone I like very much is right here in front of me, asking me to sit with him. It dawns on me that if I ignore that, or forget how important that is, than I truly will make the shadows my home.”

— Tracy Deonn

34. “From buried lives to beaten ones. From blood stolen to blood hidden. I map this terrain’s sins, the invisible, and the many, and hold them close. Because even if the pain of those sins takes my breath away, the pain feels like belonging. And ignoring it, after all I’ve just witnessed, would be loss.”

— Tracy Deonn

35. “You excel at so very many things, punishing yourself is a great example.”

— Tracy Deonn

36. “Spit it out. We don’t have all night,” Sel warns.”

— Tracy Deonn

37. “But you pulled the blade when you did and how you did because you put yourself in the right place to do so. Not your mother, not your grandmother, but you. You brought honor to your Line, and I don’t mean Arthur’s. You don’t need the sword, Bree. You are the sword. Their sword. Our sword.”

— Tracy Deonn

38. “I know you want to stop death, Bree, but be careful. Grief takes many forms. Be certain you aren’t still in its throes, but callin’ it somethin’ else.”

— Tracy Deonn

39. “When white people say something’s ‘not about race,’ it’s usually because it is and they don’t wanna talk about it.”

— Tracy Deonn

40. “But sometimes you cope by wasting time, yes?”

— Tracy Deonn

41. “I can’t tell how old she is, of course, because Black women are magical like that.”

— Tracy Deonn

42. “In the end, every conversation would require an explanation first, because no one in my life knows all of the threads that have led me here.”

— Tracy Deonn

43. “Some truths only tragedy can teach.”

— Tracy Deonn

44. “If he has to protect you, he won’t protect himself.”

— Tracy Deonn

45. “And when your people die, you have to listen to strangers speak your nightmare into existence.”

— Tracy Deonn

46. “It is always the gentle ones I fear for the most, those willing to bare their hearts, who grieve for others and feel happy for others’ happiness.”

— Tracy Deonn

47. “I used to think I shouldn’t be here, but now I know I can’t. And maybe I don’t have to be. This world wants my suffering, and I cannot keep giving it to them.”

— Tracy Deonn

48. “How could I have risked so much for a lost little girl who probably needs as much therapy as I do?” He tilts his head, eyes going unfocused. “Well, that’s not possible.” He laughs again, but this time it’s so self-deprecating it feels like my anger has nowhere to go. “No one needs as much therapy as I do.”

— Tracy Deonn

49. “I recognize that sound. It’s the sound of holding on to a cliff by the edge of your nails. The sound of barely containing a pain so immense that to look at it, to raise your own flesh and examine what’s beneath, is to risk falling into a darkness you know you’ll never escape.”

— Tracy Deonn

50. “We ran for many reasons. We ran to protect ourselves. We ran so we would not die, so that our daughters could live.”

— Tracy Deonn