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

302. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

305. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

307. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

309. “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

310. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

313. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

316. “Small places make for small lives.”

— V.E. Schwab

317. “No London is truly without magic.”

— V.E. Schwab

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

322. “I saw an Elephant, in Paris.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

324. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

326. “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

327. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

329. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

338. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

342. “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

343. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

346. “Estele, who believes that the new God is a filigreed thing. She thinks that He belongs to cities and kings, and that He sits over Paris on a golden pillow, and has no time for peasants, no place among the wood and stone and river water.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

348. “But life is pointless without pleasure.”

— V.E. Schwab

349. “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

350. “The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.”

— V.E. Schwab