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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

305. “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

306. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

316. “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

317. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

319. “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

320. “I don’t want to stay here,” Holland answered flatly. “I want to go home.”

— V.E. Schwab

321. “Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow and water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”

— V.E. Schwab

322. “We... ruin... all... we touch.”

— V.E. Schwab

323. “They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time – angry, lonely, content – but he’s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid. But he is not alone. It is beginning to rain again, the air gone damp with the metallic scent of storms in the city, and Henry doesn’t care, thinks there is something to be said for symmetry.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

325. “A hand shakes Adeline awake. For a moment, she is out of place, out of time. Sleep clings to her edges, and with it, the dream – it must have been a dream – of prayers made to silent gods, of deals made in the dark, of being forgotten. Her imagination has always been a vivid thing. “Wake up,” says a voice, one she has known all her life.”

— V.E. Schwab

326. “Tired can be a kind of sick, if it lasts long enough.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

328. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

331. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

333. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

337. “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

338. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

340. “It was never this quiet when you were here. Isn’t that funny? How much sound a body makes. I hate the silence, hate the fact that I’m the only one making noise. I make so much of it, as if I can trick myself into thinking you’re here, just out of sight.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

342. “But what is safe? Tombs are safe. Merilance was safe. Safe does not mean happy, does not mean well, does not mean kind.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

344. “Dead men can’t hold grudges.”

— V.E. Schwab

345. “Spotted with stale blood, but with her hypothesis confirmed. Sydney Clarke could raise the dead.”

— V.E. Schwab

346. “Hate was too simple a word. He and Eli were bonded, by blood and death and science. They were alike, more so now than ever. And he had missed Eli. He wanted to see him. And he wanted to see him suffer. He wanted to see the look in Eli’s eyes when he lit them up with pain. He wanted his attention.”

— V.E. Schwab

347. “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

348. “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

349. “Grey for the magic-less city. Red, for the healthy empire. White, for the starving world.”

— V.E. Schwab

350. “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