Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “The darkness plays its own game,” she says. “It makes its own rules,” she says. “And you have lost.”

— V.E. Schwab

452. “It is such a grand word, soul. Like god, like time, like space, and when she’s tried to picture it, she’s conjured images of lightning, or sunbeams through dust, of storms the shape of human forms, of vast and edgeless white. The truth is so much smaller.”

— V.E. Schwab

453. “A successful theft is an anonymous act. The absence of a mark.”

— V.E. Schwab

454. “Once you know about a thing, you start to see it everywhere.”

— V.E. Schwab

455. “She’d waged freedom. She’d wanted adventure. And she didn’t think she minded dying for it. She only wished dying didn’t hurt so much.”

— V.E. Schwab

456. “Magic is tangled, so you must be smooth. Magic is wild, so you must be tame. Magic is chaos, so you must be calm. Are you calm, Kell?”

— V.E. Schwab

457. “The darkness turns on Addie, then, and there is no vestige of Luc in the roiling smoke. There are no green eyes. No playful smirk. Nothing but a menacing void, a shadow filled with teeth. It has been a long time since Addie felt true fear. Sadness, she knows; loneliness and grief. But fear belongs to those with more to lose. And yet. Staring into that dark, Addie is afraid.”

— V.E. Schwab

458. “Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet.”

— V.E. Schwab

459. “Bea insists that everyone who works in a bookstore wants to be a writer, but Henry’s never fancied himself a novelist. Sure, he’s tried putting pen to paper, but it never really works. He can’t find the words, the story, the voice. Can’t figure out what he could possibly add to so many shelves. Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.”

— V.E. Schwab

460. “Feral magic in a lover’s form.”

— V.E. Schwab

461. “There is George Therault, and Roger’s oldest daughter, and Isabelle’s two sons, and the next time Addie comes, they will all be dead, the last of her old life – her first life – buried in the same ten-meter plot.”

— V.E. Schwab

462. “The humor, along with that horrible false cheer and fake smile, was gone, wiped away. In a way, Eli wasn’t quite as frightening, because she’d always been able to see the monster in his eyes. Now it had finally stopped hiding.”

— V.E. Schwab

463. “There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.”

— V.E. Schwab

464. “My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself. My father taught me how to be a dreamer, and my mother taught me how to be a wife, and Estele taught me how to speak to gods.”

— V.E. Schwab

465. “What do you think your London did, when the darkness came? When Osaron’s magic consumed his world, and threatened to take ours with it? You traded away our world’s safety for your own, locked the doors and trapped us between the raging water and the rocks. How does it feel now?”

— V.E. Schwab

466. “The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but the shade still belongs to winter, so Addie follows the light, sinking onto a grassy slope beneath the cloudless sky.”

— V.E. Schwab

467. “It’s a long-running sore point between them, the fact that Henry isn’t gay, that he’s attracted to a person first and their gender second. Robbie cringes, but doesn’t apologize.”

— V.E. Schwab

468. “God, it feels good to be wanted. Everywhere he goes, he can feel the ripple, the attention, shifting toward him. Henry leans into the attention, the smiles, the warmth, the light. For the first time he truly understands the concept of being drunk with power.”

— V.E. Schwab

469. “She spins and twirls, and dances partner-less across the snow, laughing at the strange and simple magic of the moment.”

— V.E. Schwab

470. “I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to know if it was real or if I’m expected to grow and wither here for nothing more than superstition. Wouldn’t that be funny? If it were just a story, passed from one Prior to the next until all of us forgot that it was fiction? All of us, given to the same mad delusion?”

— V.E. Schwab

471. “I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions.”

— V.E. Schwab

472. “A vein of power. An artery.”

— V.E. Schwab

473. “Dreamer is too soft a word. It conjures thoughts of silken sleep, of lazy days in fields of tall grass, of charcoal smudges on soft parchment.”

— V.E. Schwab

474. “She wants to hold the night like a chocolate on her tongue, savor every second before it melts.”

— V.E. Schwab

475. “But Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses. He plants them one by one, like flower bulbs, lets them blossom on her skin.”

— V.E. Schwab

476. “We want to prove things, in life, more than we want to disprove them. We want to believe.”

— V.E. Schwab

477. “All her life, she wanted a house and a garden and a room of her own. But tucked inside that want was something else: a family. Parents who smothered her with love. Siblings who teased because they cared. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews – in her mind a family was a sprawling thing, an orchard full of roots and branches.”

— V.E. Schwab

478. “Alucard’s eyes had gone sharp and empty at the same time, as if he were focusing, just on something else, something far away.”

— V.E. Schwab

479. “They always know, they just don’t want to accept the cost. The soul is the easiest thing to trade. It’s the time no one considers.”

— V.E. Schwab

480. “I’m fine, he says, in that automatic way people always answer when you ask them how they are, even though his heart is hanging open on its hinges.”

— V.E. Schwab

481. “Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human. The difference between Victor and Eli, he suspected, wasn’t their opinion on EOs. It was their reaction to them.”

— V.E. Schwab

482. “She dragged her head up and saw Kell standing in the road, the strange magical boy in his black coat, looking breathless and angry. Lila couldn’t believe it.”

— V.E. Schwab

483. “Maybe not for you,” said the king. “But time isn’t the same for the mad and the blind.”

— V.E. Schwab

484. “Yes. Because unless you plan to wed me yourself – and don’t get me wrong, I think we’d make a dashing pair – I must try and find a mate.”

— V.E. Schwab

485. “Most people have a shelf of cups. Henry has a wall. They hang from hooks on a mounted rack, five across and seven down. Some of them are patterned and some of them are plain and no two are the same.”

— V.E. Schwab

486. “Normal was such a fragile thing, so easily upset by even good intentions.”

— V.E. Schwab

487. “Black curls. Pale eyes. Strong jaw. Sloping shoulders and a cupid’s bow mouth. A man she’d never meet, a life she’d never know, a world she could only dream of.”

— V.E. Schwab

488. “I apologize for shooting you in the leg,” said Lila. “I was entirely myself.”

— V.E. Schwab

489. “Estele, who believes that the new God is a filigreed thing. She thinks that He belongs to cities and kings, and that He sits over Paris on a golden pillow, and has no time for peasants, no place among the wood and stone and river water.”

— V.E. Schwab

490. “Estelle used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.”

— V.E. Schwab

491. “We can’t all turn blood and whispers into weapons.”

— V.E. Schwab

492. “There is something about him that keeps catching her attention, snagging it the way a nail snags a sweater.”

— V.E. Schwab

493. “Because I can’t stay here,” she snapped, the smile gone from her face. “Because I want to see the world, even if it’s not mine. And because I will save your life.”

— V.E. Schwab

494. “Pure magic has no self. It simply is, a force of nature, the blood of our world, the marrow of our bones. We give it shape, but we must never give it soul. – MASTER TIEREN, head priest of the London Sanctuary.”

— V.E. Schwab

495. “They crashed into each other as if propelled by gravity, and he didn’t know which one of them was the object and which the earth, only that they were colliding. The kiss was Lila pressed into a single gesture. Her brazen pride and her stubborn resolve, her recklessness and her daring and her hunger for freedom. It was all those things, and it took Kell’s breath away.”

— V.E. Schwab

496. “Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”

— V.E. Schwab

497. “How to exist in a world that does not want you. How to be a ghost in someone else’s home.”

— V.E. Schwab

498. “I don’t know what they want from me,” he says. “I don’t know who they want me to be. They tell you to be yourself, but they don’t mean it, and I’m just tired... ” His voice breaks. “I’m tired of falling short. Tired of being... it’s not that I’m alone. I don’t mind being alone. But this–” His fingers knot in his shirtfront. “It hurts.”

— V.E. Schwab

499. “But even there Eli had haunted him, tarnished his enjoyment by clinging to his thoughts, whispering in his head, ruining his peace. And after ten years of waiting, it was Victor’s turn, to get into Eli’s head and do some ruining.”

— V.E. Schwab

500. “Her body sang like a tuning fork against his, like finding like.”

— V.E. Schwab