Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “You must make time for that which matters, for that which defines you: your passion, your progress, your pen. Take it up, and write your own story.”

— V.E. Schwab

102. “I would rather see clouds blot out the stars.”

— V.E. Schwab

103. “Overnight Success is almost always a myth. Half this industry is luck, and the other half is the refusal to quit.”

— V.E. Schwab

104. “His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.”

— V.E. Schwab

105. “She will come back to this moment a thousand times. In frustration, and regret, in sorrow, and self-pity, and unbridled rage. She will come to face the fact that she cursed herself before he ever did.”

— V.E. Schwab

106. “Palimpsest. She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear it for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present, and think of this moment in Le Mans. A.”

— V.E. Schwab

107. “Only fools are certain.”

— V.E. Schwab

108. “You move among them like a ghost, because you are not one of them. You cannot live like them. You cannot love like them. You cannot belong with them. You belong to me. With me.”

— V.E. Schwab

109. “And then he whispers three words into her hair. “I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.”

— V.E. Schwab

110. “No one suffers as beautifully as you do.”

— V.E. Schwab

111. “You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”

— V.E. Schwab

112. “You deserve someone who loves you as you are. the good and the bad and the maddening.”

— V.E. Schwab

113. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.”

— V.E. Schwab

114. “After all, if you run far enough, no one can catch you.”

— V.E. Schwab

115. “There is nowhere you go,” said the Antari to her prince, “that I cannot follow.”

— V.E. Schwab

116. “The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”

— V.E. Schwab

117. “Nothing is all good or all bad. Life is so much messier than that.”

— V.E. Schwab

118. “You know so little of war. Battles may be fought from the outside in, but wars are won from the inside out.”

— V.E. Schwab

119. “She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat.”

— V.E. Schwab

120. “Careful is a calculated risk,” he said. “And I’m very good at making those.”

— V.E. Schwab

121. “It is a car crash in slow motion, and Addie knew it was bound to happen, the inevitable collision of people and place, time and circumstance.”

— V.E. Schwab

122. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because visions weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades... Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end... everyone wants to be remembered.”

— V.E. Schwab

123. “But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things – she would go mad. She has gone mad. What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.”

— V.E. Schwab

124. “But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten, To remember when know one else does.”

— V.E. Schwab

125. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” “I get the feeling that’s not what Thomas Jefferson meant,” muttered Mitch.”

— V.E. Schwab

126. “These days, everyone’s looking down,” muses Sam. “It’s nice to see someone looking up.”

— V.E. Schwab

127. “Humans are capable of such wondrous things. Of cruelty, and war, but also art and invention.”

— V.E. Schwab

128. “That’s the trouble with March – the warmth never lasts. There’s that narrow stretch when it parades as spring, just enough for you to thaw if you’re sitting in the sun, but then it’s gone. The sun has moved on. The shadows have swept in.”

— V.E. Schwab

129. “Kell swept Lila up into his arms, amazed at her lightness. She took up so much space in the world – in his world – it was hard to imagine her being so slight. In his mind, she was made of stone.”

— V.E. Schwab

130. “And she is tired. Unspeakably tired. But there is no question she has lived. “Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.” And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”

— V.E. Schwab

131. “Outnumbered is not the same as outmatched.”

— V.E. Schwab

132. “I am so happy. I am so scared. The two, it turns out, can walk together, hand in hand.”

— V.E. Schwab

133. “Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse. – Joseph Brodsky.”

— V.E. Schwab

134. “So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.”

— V.E. Schwab

135. “It will hurt. And it will pass. All things do.”

— V.E. Schwab

136. “Perhaps you are haunting me. What a comforting thought. Maybe it’s you in the darkness.”

— V.E. Schwab

137. “You aren’t some avenging angel, Eli,” he said. “You’re not blessed, or divine, or burdened. You’re a science experiment.”

— V.E. Schwab

138. “Be lost. Give up. give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be lost And then you will not care if you are ever found.”

— V.E. Schwab

139. “You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”

— V.E. Schwab

140. “Such is the quandary when it comes to magic, that it is not an issue of strength but of balance. For too little power, and we become weak. Too much, and we become something else entirely.”

— V.E. Schwab

141. “Some people are repelled by darkness. Others are drawn to it, to the static crackle of power in a place. To the hum of magic, or the presence of the dead. They can see these forces staining the world like ink in water.”

— V.E. Schwab

142. “Purity without balance is its own corruption.”

— V.E. Schwab

143. “Your freckles look like stars.”

— V.E. Schwab

144. “Every end may be a new beginning, but every beginning had to end.”

— V.E. Schwab

145. “Sydney, look at me.′ He rested his hands on the car roof and leaned in. ‘No one is going to hurt you. Do you know why?’ She shook her head, and Victor smiled. ‘Because I’ll hurt them first.”

— V.E. Schwab

146. “Home is a choice. Those four words sit alone on a page in her mother’s book, surrounded by so much white space they feel like a riddle. In truth, everything her mother wrote feels like a riddle, waiting to be solved.”

— V.E. Schwab

147. “You almost died, Kell. So now you know what it feels like to live. To fear for that life. To fight for it. And once you know, well, there’s no going back.” His.”

— V.E. Schwab

148. “Beneath him, sprawled on the tiles, was the lifeless body of Eli Cardale. Eli, who showed up in the hallway sophomore year with a suitcase and a smile. Eli, who believed in God and had a monster inside just like Victor, but knew how to hide it better.”

— V.E. Schwab

149. “Rain drums its fingers on the garden shed.”

— V.E. Schwab

150. “Here, he is the darkness she met that night. Feral magic in a lover’s form. His edges blur into shadow, his skin the color of moonlight, his eyes the exact shade of the moss behind him. He is wild. But so is she.”

— V.E. Schwab