Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

303. “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

304. “Muriel Strauss, who at twenty-four only ever talks about the world in terms of conceptual authenticity and creative truth, who’s been a darling of the New York art scene since her first semester at Tisch, where she quickly realized she was better at critiquing art than creating it.”

— V.E. Schwab

305. “You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”

— V.E. Schwab

306. “A park in London. A patio in Prague. A tea room in Edinburgh.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

308. “He is always late. It has been the start of many quarrels, and there was a time when he thought it was carelessness on his part, before he realized it was some strange attempt at self-preservation, an intentional, albeit subconscious dawdling, a delay of the inevitable, uncomfortable necessity of showing up.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

310. “She hates this part. She shouldn’t have lingered. Should have been out of sight as well as out of mind, but there’s always that nagging hope that this time, it will be different, that this time, they will remember.”

— V.E. Schwab

311. “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

312. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

314. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

316. “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

317. “Lila Bard lived by a simple rule: if a thing was worth having, it was worth taking.”

— V.E. Schwab

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

323. “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

324. “Food is one of the best things about being alive. Not just food. Good food.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

327. “Small places make for small lives.”

— V.E. Schwab

328. “No London is truly without magic.”

— V.E. Schwab

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

333. “He wished for the first time in his life that he believed in God.”

— V.E. Schwab

334. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

336. “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

337. “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

338. “She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat. She missed the sound of his voice, the knowing in his touch, the flint-on-stone friction of their conversations, the way they fit together.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

340. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

342. “It is not as still as death, not as empty, or calm. There is a violence to this blind black void. It is birds’ wings beating against her skin. It is the rush of the wind in her hair. It is a thousand whispering voices. It is fear, and falling, and it is a feral, wild feeling, and by the time she thinks to scream, the darkness has peeled away again, the night has re-formed, and Luc is once again beside her.”

— V.E. Schwab

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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