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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

306. “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

307. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

309. “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

310. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

313. “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

314. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

316. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

318. “Eli, who believed in God and had a monster inside just like Victor, but knew how to hide it better.”

— V.E. Schwab

319. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

321. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

323. “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

324. “The night Kate Harker decided to burn down the school chapel, she wasn’t angry or drunk. She was desperate.”

— V.E. Schwab

325. “But here is the danger of a place like Villon. Blink – and a year is gone. Blink – and five more follow. It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.”

— V.E. Schwab

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “She said no, and learned how much the word was worth.”

— V.E. Schwab

330. “This is how change happens. Not with a whisper and a wish like in those tales of yours, but with a well-executed plan – and, yes, a bit of blood, but that’s the way of the world, isn’t it?”

— V.E. Schwab

331. “You know so little of war. Battles may be fought from the outside in, but wars are won from the inside out... Kingdoms and crowns are taken from within. The strongest fortress can withstand any attack from beyond its walls, and yet even it is not fortified against an attack from behind them.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “The time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.”

— V.E. Schwab

339. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

341. “Dead men can’t hold grudges.”

— V.E. Schwab

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

348. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

350. “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