Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “The world is wide, and he’s seen so little of it with his own eyes. He wants to travel, to take photos, listen to other people’s stories, maybe make some of his own. After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.”

— V.E. Schwab

302. “What I want, what I’ve always truly wanted, is for someone to remember me. That’s why you can say my name. That’s why you can go away and come back, and still know who I am. And that’s why I can look at you, and see you as you are. And it is enough. It will always be enough.”

— V.E. Schwab

303. “I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

— V.E. Schwab

304. “The darkness has granted her freedom from death, perhaps, but not from this. Not from suffering.”

— V.E. Schwab

305. “Dead men can’t hold grudges.”

— V.E. Schwab

306. “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.”

— V.E. Schwab

307. “Magic might live in the blood, but not in the bloodline. It wasn’t passed from parent to child. It chose its own way. Chose its shape. The strong sometimes gave birth to the weak, or the other way around. Fire wielders were often born from water mages, earth movers from healers. Power could not be cultivated like a crop, distilled through generations.”

— V.E. Schwab

308. “Magic and magician must between them balance. Magic itself is chaos. The magician must be calm. A fractured self is a poor vessel for power, spilling power without focus or measure from every crack.”

— V.E. Schwab

309. “Life is so brief, and every night in Rennes I’d go to bed, and lie awake, and think, there is another day behind me, and who knows how far ahead.”

— V.E. Schwab

310. “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

311. “It was the only time the heavy panic set in, panic that she would never leave, never get to go home. She would be forgotten here, wearing the same pale clothes as everyone else, blending in with the patients and the nurses and the walls, and her family would be outside in the world and she would bleed away like a memory, like a colorful shirt washed too many times.”

— V.E. Schwab

312. “And he had missed Eli. He wanted to see him. And he wanted to see him suffer.”

— V.E. Schwab

313. “It is just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake.”

— V.E. Schwab

314. “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

315. “People survived by being cautious, but they got ahead by being bold.”

— V.E. Schwab

316. “My life is mine to spend,” she said. “And I will not spend it here, no matter how nice your city is, or how much safer it might be. We had a deal, Kell. And now you have Tieren to guard your story and heal your brother. I’m of no use to him. Let me be of use to you.”

— V.E. Schwab

317. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

319. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

321. “Henry’s mouth quirks, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “At least you think I’m good-looking.”

— V.E. Schwab

322. “Perhaps,” she said, “or perhaps I will go with you to the end of the world. After all, you’ve made me curious.” “Lila – ” His eyes were dark with pain and worry, but she only smiled. “One adventure at a time,” she said.”

— V.E. Schwab

323. “She bent most of the rules. She broke the rest.”

— V.E. Schwab

324. “I saw an Elephant, in Paris.”

— V.E. Schwab

325. “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

326. “Alucard knew the Maresh palace better than he should. Rhy had shown him a dozen ways in and out; hidden doors and secret halls, a curtain pulled aside to reveal a stairwell, a door set flush with the wall. All the ways a friend could sneak into a room, or a lover into bed.”

— V.E. Schwab

327. “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

328. “Outside the window, the day just carries on as if nothing’s changed, but it feels like everything has, because Addie LaRue is immortal, and Henry Strauss is damned.”

— V.E. Schwab

329. “We may share an ability, you and I, but that does not make us equals.”

— V.E. Schwab

330. “Olivia hugs the journals to her front and slips out, wondering how many ghouls there are at Gallant. One for every gravestone? Do the dead always come home?”

— V.E. Schwab

331. “Her hand slid beneath his shirt with all the practiced grace of a thief. But this time she wanted him to feel her touch, her palms gliding over his ribs and around his back, fingertips digging into her shoulder blades.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

333. “And in the morning it looks like ghosts have danced across the kitchen, and they pretend there were two instead of one.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “She will learn in time that she can lie, and the words will flow like wine, easily poured, easily swallowed. But the truth will always stop at the end of her tongue. Her story silenced for all but herself.”

— V.E. Schwab

340. “Lila Bard knew in her bones that she was meant to be a pirate. All she needed was a working ship.”

— V.E. Schwab

341. “She pauses at MEMOIR, studying the titles on the spines, so many I’s and Me’s and My’s, possessive words for possessive lives. What a luxury, to tell one’s story. To be read, remembered.”

— V.E. Schwab

342. “A life worth having is a life worth taking.”

— V.E. Schwab

343. “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

344. “The doctors gave him a few months, and he told everyone, and do you know what they did? They couldn’t handle it. They were so caught up in their grief, they mourned him before he was even dead. There’s no way to un-know the fact that someone is dying. It eats away all the normal, and leaves something wrong and rotten in its place.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

346. “Maybe we are broken. But we put ourselves back together. We survived. That’s what makes us so powerful. And as for family – well, blood is always family, but family doesn’t always have to be blood.”

— V.E. Schwab

347. “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

348. “You look like a wilted flower,” teases Addie. Sam winks and lifts her cup. “Water me, and watch me bloom.”

— V.E. Schwab

349. “So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights...”

— V.E. Schwab

350. “Pretending not to be sad was the hardest, but looking sad made people think you were weak, and when you were already a foot too short and a measure too small, and a girl on top of that, you had to work twice as hard to convince them it wasn’t true.”

— V.E. Schwab