Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Your enemy’s strength is also their weakness.”

— V.E. Schwab

102. “He may be a sun, but she is a shining comet, dragging their focus like burning meteors in her wake.”

— V.E. Schwab

103. “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

104. “What’s life without a little trouble?”

— V.E. Schwab

105. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

112. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

120. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

123. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

125. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

129. “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

130. “Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling – the hope – that everyone was born with the ability to do something, that if he just searched hard enough he would find it. His gift. His purpose.”

— V.E. Schwab

131. “I am Delilah Bard, she thought as the ropes cut into her skin. I am a thief and a pirate and a traveler. I have set foot in three different worlds, and lived. I have shed the blood of royals and held magic in my hands. And a ship full of men cannot do what I can. I don’t need any of you. I am one of a damned kind. Feeling suitably empowered, she set her back to the ship, and gazed out at the sprawling night ahead.”

— V.E. Schwab

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— 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. “The darkness whispers in her ear, arms wrapped like a scarf around her throat. I am always with you.”

— 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. “You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

147. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

149. “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

150. “Victor stared at the wall as if it were still a window. “He doesn’t know how patient you are,” he said. “Doesn’t know you like I do.” Eli cleaned the blood from his hand. “No,” he said softly. “No one ever has.”

— V.E. Schwab