Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

253. “Aut viam invenium aut faciam, and so on.” She does not know Latin yet, and he does not offer a translation, but a decade from now, she will look up the words, and learn their meaning. To find a way, or make your own.”

— V.E. Schwab

254. “The Essen Tasch is itself a kind of lesson,” continued Alucard, “that it doesn’t matter what you call magic, as long as you can believe.”

— V.E. Schwab

255. “Anoshe was a word for strangers in the street, and lovers between meetings, for parents and children, friends and family. It softened the blow of leaving. Eased the strain of parting. A careful nod to the certainty of today, the mystery of tomorrow.”

— V.E. Schwab

256. “If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

258. “Date. A date is something made, something planned; not a chance of opportunity, but time set aside at one point for another, a moment in the future.”

— V.E. Schwab

259. “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

260. “Anoshe brought solace. And hope. And the strength to let go.”

— V.E. Schwab

261. “I do not know why you two are circling each other like stars. It is not my cosmic dance. But I do know that you come asking after one another, when only a few strides and a handful of stars divide you.”

— V.E. Schwab

262. “People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

264. “Safe does not mean happy, does not mean well, does not mean kind.”

— V.E. Schwab

265. “Crime isn’t that complicated. People steal because taking something gives them something. If they’re not in it for the money, they’re in it for control. The act of taking, of breaking the rules, makes them feel powerful. They’re in it for the sheer defiance. Some people steal to stay alive, and some steal to feel alive.”

— V.E. Schwab

266. “He’s not a bad man,” she said. “There are no good men in this game,” said Mitch. But Sydney didn’t care about good. She wasn’t sure she believed in it.”

— V.E. Schwab

267. “Don’t you see?” said Calla. “He wasn’t coming to pay your debt. He was coming to see if you’d returned to pay it yourself.” Lila felt her face go hot. “I do not know why you two are circling each other like stars. It is not my cosmic dance. But I do know that you come asking after one another, when only a few strides and a handful of stars divide you.”

— V.E. Schwab

268. “Take your echoes and pretend they are a voice.”

— V.E. Schwab

269. “But what did that mean? Was family the ones you were born to, or the ones who took you in? Did the first years of his life weigh more than the rest?”

— V.E. Schwab

270. “Blood was magic made manifest. There it thrived. And there it poisoned. Kell had seen what happened when power warred with the body, watched it darken in the veins of corrupted men, turning their blood from crimson to black. If red was the color of magic in balance – of harmony between power and humanity – then black was the color of magic without balance, without order, without restraint.”

— V.E. Schwab

271. “Well, when you wonder something,” said Eli, “doesn’t that mean part of you wants to believe in it? I think we want to prove things, in life, more than we want to disprove them. We want to believe.”

— V.E. Schwab

272. “It was like cooking, not baking. Baking took a sense of order. Cooking took a flare, a little art, a little luck.”

— V.E. Schwab

273. “Even rocks wear away to nothing.”

— V.E. Schwab

274. “It was like watching two people, one hiding in the other’s skin.”

— V.E. Schwab

275. “Life can feel so long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast.”

— V.E. Schwab

276. “It was a voice like a shadow in the woods at night. Quiet and dark and cold.”

— V.E. Schwab

277. “That is the madness of it. Every day is amber, and she is the fly trapped inside. No way to think in days or weeks when she lives in moments. Time begins to lose its meaning – and yet, she has not lost track of time.”

— V.E. Schwab

278. “The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud’s or George’s, or any man who might have her.”

— V.E. Schwab

279. “There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.”

— V.E. Schwab

280. “They are a sea of strangers, unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes, with unfamiliar voices, calling unfamiliar words. It feels as if the doors of her world have been thrown wide, so many rooms added to a house she thought she knew.”

— V.E. Schwab

281. “There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone. You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs – those are, for her, a luxury – but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.”

— V.E. Schwab

282. “Addie is so many things, thinks Henry. But she is not forgettable. How could anyone forget this girl, when she takes up so much space? She fills the room with stories, with laughter, with warmth and light.”

— V.E. Schwab

283. “And strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules. It’s about knowing how to break them.”

— V.E. Schwab

284. “Barron’s kindness was like a curse, because she knew she had done nothing to deserve it.”

— V.E. Schwab

285. “She has listened to the bells, and the organ, and the calls to prayer. And yet, despite it all, she has never understood the appeal. How does a ceiling bring you closer to heaven? If God is so large, why build walls to hold Him in?”

— V.E. Schwab

286. “A thief plays the game only when they think they’ll win. A pirate plays the game even when they think they’ll lose.”

— V.E. Schwab

287. “And by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.”

— V.E. Schwab

288. “Divest yourself of weapons, or I will do it for you.”

— V.E. Schwab

289. “Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.”

— V.E. Schwab

290. “And when the girl looks at him, she doesn’t see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse. She sees the truth, and he doesn’t know how, or why, only knows that he doesn’t want it to end. Because for the first time in months, in years, his whole life, perhaps, Henry doesn’t feel cursed at all. For the first time, he feels seen.”

— V.E. Schwab

291. “I would have lost my mind.” “Oh, I did,” she says blithely. “But when you live long enough, even madness ends.”

— V.E. Schwab

292. “No,” he said. “That’s not magic, Lila. That’s just murder.”

— V.E. Schwab

293. “No London is truly without magic.”

— V.E. Schwab

294. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

296. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

299. “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

300. “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