Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “History is a thing designed in retrospect.”

— V.E. Schwab

252. “A soul, for copper coins on a Paris dock.”

— V.E. Schwab

253. “Olivia Prior has never been a quiet girl. She has always made a point of making noise, everywhere she goes, in part to remind people that just because she cannot speak, does not mean that she is silent, and in part because she simply likes the weight of sound, likes the way it takes up space.”

— V.E. Schwab

254. “In myths, the hero survives. The evil is vanquished. The world is set right. Sometimes there are celebrations, and sometimes there are funerals. The dead are buried. The living move on. Nothing changes. Everything changes. This is a myth. This is not a myth.”

— 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. “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

257. “As far as she was concerned, family had nothing to do with proximity or blood. Family was a chosen thing. A label earned.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

259. “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

260. “A throne of wood and a false title does not make you queen of anything.”

— V.E. Schwab

261. “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

262. “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

263. “People tend to talk to Olivia, or rather, at her, some uneasy with the silence, others treating it as an invitation.”

— V.E. Schwab

264. “Addie orders a large coffee and two muffins, one blueberry and the other chocolate chip, and then hands over a crumpled ten that she’d found on Toby’s coffee table.”

— V.E. Schwab

265. “I’m not going to die,” she said. “Not till I’ve seen it.” “Seen what?” Her smile widened. “Everything.” Kell.”

— V.E. Schwab

266. “Small places make for small lives.”

— V.E. Schwab

267. “No London is truly without magic.”

— V.E. Schwab

268. “Love doesn’t keep us from freezing to death, Kell,” she continued, “or starving, or being knifed for the coins in our pocket. Love doesn’t buy us anything, so be glad for what you have and who you have because you may want for things but you need for nothing.”

— V.E. Schwab

269. “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

270. “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

271. “Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a deathbed and perhaps a childbed between, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived. There will be no Paris. No green-eyed lover. No trips on boats to faraway lands. No foreign skies. No life beyond this village. No life at all, unless –.”

— V.E. Schwab

272. “Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

274. “It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?”

— V.E. Schwab

275. “I love you, Kell, but I had no interest in matching tattoos.”

— V.E. Schwab

276. “The sky outside is a static gray, a thin mist of rain blurring the buildings. It is the kind of day designed for wood fires, and mugs of tea, and well-loved books.”

— V.E. Schwab

277. “I see someone who cares,” she says slowly. “Perhaps too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world full of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”

— V.E. Schwab

278. “He lifted his glass. “To never dying.” Eli lifted his. “To being remembered.” Their glasses clinked as Eli added, “Forever.”

— V.E. Schwab

279. “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

280. “We’re all here for a reason, Bard. Some reasons are just bigger than others. So I guess I’m not scared of who you are, or even what you are. I’m scared of why you are.”

— V.E. Schwab

281. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

283. “We don’t choose what we are, but we choose what we do.”

— V.E. Schwab

284. “Pain, Victor had learned, turned people into animals.”

— V.E. Schwab

285. “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

286. “Free – such a small word for such a magnificent thing.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

288. “Who knows? Maybe the world’s gone crooked. Maybe you’re still possessed. Or maybe you just got a taste of what it really means to be alive. Take it from someone who’s had her fair share of close calls. 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.”

— V.E. Schwab

289. “Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?”

— V.E. Schwab

290. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

293. “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” he asked Lila now. She looked at him as if it were a strange question. And then she shook her head. “Death comes for everyone,” she said simply. “I’m not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here.” She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. “I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”

— V.E. Schwab

294. “And dreams can never hurt you. That’s what her mother said. Of course, she knows now it isn’t true. Dreams can make you hurt yourself, dreams can make you do so many things, if you’re not careful.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

296. “Would you rather feel nothing or everything?”

— V.E. Schwab

297. “But Muriel’s always been like strong perfume. Better in small doses. And at a distance.”

— V.E. Schwab

298. “There were a hundred shades between a truth and lie, and she knew them all.”

— V.E. Schwab

299. “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

300. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”

— V.E. Schwab