Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “You look like a wilted flower,” teases Addie. Sam winks and lifts her cup. “Water me, and watch me bloom.”

— V.E. Schwab

352. “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

353. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

355. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

358. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

361. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

373. “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

374. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

376. “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

377. “Victor had never been good, or sweet – he’d always had a sharp edge; Eli had been drawn to the metallic glint of it –.”

— V.E. Schwab

378. “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

379. “Ignorance is only bliss if you want to get caught.”

— V.E. Schwab

380. “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

381. “That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David’s book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so... happy. 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 photo’s are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

— V.E. Schwab

382. “She breathes life into him with every line. And with every stroke, coaxes out another story.”

— V.E. Schwab

383. “You’re free to leave, if you have somewhere else to go. But if you go – and now and then, girls do – you will not be welcomed back. Once a year, sometimes more, a girl pounds at the door, desperate to get back in, and that is how the others learn that it’s well and good to dream of happy lives and welcome homes, but even a grim tombstone of a place is better than the street.”

— V.E. Schwab

384. “Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps – perhaps – they are in reach.”

— V.E. Schwab

385. “She fills the room with stories, with laughter, with warmth and light.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

387. “It is easier to be alone among so many people.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

389. “Only you would arrive early to your own death.”

— V.E. Schwab

390. “I would see you again,” he says, “in daylight, or in darkness. As a woman, or a man. Please, let me see you again.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

392. “Glass bites into her hand, and the pain is sharp, and real, the sudden scald of a burn without the lasting scar, and she does not care. In moments her cuts have already closed. The glasses and bottle lie whole. Once she thought it was a blessing, this inability to break, but now, the impotence is maddening.”

— V.E. Schwab

393. “Because you don’t think I’m a bad person, he said. And I don’t want to prove you wrong.”

— V.E. Schwab

394. “Eli’s face slowly, slowly, began to open, and Victor felt his chest loosen with relief as Eli’s darker self peeked through.”

— V.E. Schwab

395. “Why do you want to die? I don’t, she’d say. I just want to live.”

— V.E. Schwab

396. “They became vessels, conduits, for its will, and through them, it twisted whim into reality, blurring the lines, breaking them down, creating and destroying and corrupting everything.”

— V.E. Schwab

397. “Suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty is such a heavy thing.”

— V.E. Schwab

398. “She forgave him nothing. She owed him everything.”

— V.E. Schwab

399. “Myths do not happen all at once. They do not spring forth whole into the world. They form slowly, rolled between the hands of time until their edges smooth, until the saying of the story gives enough weight to the words – to the memories – to keep them rolling on their own.”

— V.E. Schwab

400. “Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses.”

— V.E. Schwab