Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I think there are many ways to matter.” He plucks the book from his pocket. “These are the words of a man – Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”

— V.E. Schwab

202. “Since you have a knack for finding people – ” “I have a knack for killing people,” corrected June. “Finding them is simply a prerequisite.”

— V.E. Schwab

203. “Paris, France July 29, 1719.”

— V.E. Schwab

204. “Once upon a time. This is how the story starts. She will not remember the stories themselves, but she will recall the way he tells them; the words feel smooth as river stones, and she wonders if he tells these stories when he is alone, if he carries on, talking to Maxime in this easy, gentle way. Wonders if he tells stories to the wood as he is working it. Or if they are just for her.”

— V.E. Schwab

205. “Whatever I am, she thought, pressing her hand to the wall, let it be enough.”

— V.E. Schwab

206. “He would see her again. He knew he would. Magic bent the world. Pulled it into shape. There were fixed points. Most of the time those points were places. But sometimes, rarely, they were people. For someone who never stood still, Lila still felt like a pin in Kell’s world. One he was sure to snag on. He.”

— V.E. Schwab

207. “Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke? Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

209. “I am not some genie, bound to your whim.” He pushes off the tree. “Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”

— V.E. Schwab

210. “Was it madness, to believe? Or arrogance, to not?”

— V.E. Schwab

211. “Delilah Bard had a way of finding trouble. She’d always thought it was better than letting trouble find her, but floating in the ocean in a two-person skiff with no oars, no view of land, and no real resources save the ropes binding her wrists, she was beginning to reconsider. The.”

— V.E. Schwab

212. “Easy when you didn’t care, when people came onto the page and walked away again, back to their own stories, and you could imagine whatever you wanted for them, if you cared enough to write it in your head. Barron.”

— V.E. Schwab

213. “There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

216. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.” “But no photographs. No film.”

— V.E. Schwab

217. “A good friend is very hard to find.”

— V.E. Schwab

218. “I don’t mean in a normal, time flies way,” Henry’s saying. “I mean feeling like it’s surging by so fast, and you try to reach out and grab it, you try to hold on, but it just keeps rushing away. And every second, there’s a little less time, and a little less air, and sometimes when I’m sitting still, I start to think about it, and when I think about it, I can’t breathe. I have to get up. I have to move.”

— V.E. Schwab

219. “I remember you.” Three words, large enough to tip the world.”

— V.E. Schwab

220. “Trouble followed him like a shadow, clinging to him no matter how much good light he tried to stand in. In his hands, good things broke and bad things grew.”

— V.E. Schwab

221. “Toby is a musician, and the signs of his art are everywhere. In the instruments that lean against the walls. In the scribbled lines and notes scattered on tables- bars of half-remembered melodies mixed in with grocery lists and weekly to do’s.”

— V.E. Schwab

222. “Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.”

— V.E. Schwab

223. “Some people were matches, a bit of light and no heat. And some were furnaces, all heat but little light. And then, once in a blue moon, there was a bonfire, something so hot and bright you couldn’t stand too near without burning.”

— V.E. Schwab

224. “History is a thing designed in retrospect.”

— V.E. Schwab

225. “And Ulysses stopped up his ears against the siren’s song,” recited Victor, pulling the plugs from his own ears as Serena collapsed to the dirt lot, “for it was death.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

227. “A boy is sick of his broken heart. Tired of his storm-filled brain. So he drinks until he cannot feel the pieces scraping together in his chest, until he cannot hear the thunder rolling through his head.”

— V.E. Schwab

228. “Heaven is a nice spot in the shade, a broad tree over my bones.”

— V.E. Schwab

229. “Easy to stay on the path when the road is straight and the steps are numbered.”

— V.E. Schwab

230. “Don’t kill the messenger,” said Lila when the two were gone, “but I think the princess is trying to get into your” – her gaze trailed Kell up and down – “good graces.”

— V.E. Schwab

231. “This is how change happens. Not with a whisper and a wish like in those tales of yours, but with a well-executed plan – and, yes, a bit of blood, but that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?”

— V.E. Schwab

232. “Maybe we are broken. But we put ourselves back together. We survived. That’s what makes us so powerful.”

— V.E. Schwab

233. “A breeze trickles through the air, carrying as much relief as a dryer vent.”

— V.E. Schwab

234. “Victor knew he was playing a dangerous game. The odds were terrible, the stakes monumental. It was Russian roulette, except that a bullet would be a cleaner end.”

— V.E. Schwab

235. “She said no, and learned how much the word was worth.”

— V.E. Schwab

236. “It ends, he thought – no fear, only relief, and sadness. He had tried. Had given everything he could. But he was so tired. The rustle of leaves in his ears was getting louder, and he felt himself sinking against the tree, into the embrace of something softer than metal, darker than night. His heart slowed, winding down like a music box, a season at its end. The last air left Holland’s lungs. And then, at last, the world breathed in.”

— V.E. Schwab

237. “Dying doesn’t help the dead. It doesn’t find the lost. A lot of people have fallen. But some of us are still standing. So if you want to give up, walk out that curtain. I won’t stop you. I won’t save you again. But if you want to put your second chance to better use, come with me.”

— V.E. Schwab

238. “I can shape death,” he says, gesturing to the conjured figures. “But you can give it life.”

— V.E. Schwab

239. “There used to be all kinds of aven. Ones who could master all the elements. Ones who could only master one, but were so powerful, they could change the tides, or the wind, or the seasons. Ones who could hear what magic had to say. Aven isn’t just one thing, because magic isn’t just one thing. It’s everything, old and new and always changing.”

— V.E. Schwab

240. “If I’m missing something, then so are you. Life is about compromises. Or did you think because you put yourself in God’s hands that He would make you all you were and more?”

— V.E. Schwab

241. “You are perfect, because you don’t exist.”

— V.E. Schwab

242. “Here is a new kind of silence, rarer than the rest. The easy quiet of familiar spaces, of places that fill simply because you are not alone within them.”

— V.E. Schwab

243. “A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.”

— V.E. Schwab

244. “You want an ending, she says. “Then take my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.” The shadow tips his head, suddenly intrigued. A smile – just like the smile in her drawings, askance, and full of secrets – crosses his mouth. And then he pulls her to him. A lover’s embrace. He is smoke, and skin, air and bone, and when his mouth presses against hers, the first thing she tastes are the turning of the seasons, the moment when dusk gives way to night.”

— V.E. Schwab

245. “Haunt – it is the right word, for someone living like a ghost.”

— V.E. Schwab

246. “The easy quiet of familiar spaces, of places that fill simply because you are not alone within them.”

— V.E. Schwab

247. “We all have battle scars. People in our past.”

— V.E. Schwab

248. “I do not know why you two are circling each other like stars. It is not my cosmic dance.”

— V.E. Schwab

249. “The earth beneath your feet does not care you will be king. Nor the water in your cup. Nor the air you breath. You must speak to them as equal.”

— V.E. Schwab

250. “The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present.”

— V.E. Schwab