Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “And when the girl looks at him, she doesn’t see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse. She sees the truth, and he doesn’t know how, or why, only knows that he doesn’t want it to end. Because for the first time in months, in years, his whole life, perhaps, Henry doesn’t feel cursed at all. For the first time, he feels seen.”

— V.E. Schwab

352. “No,” he said. “That’s not magic, Lila. That’s just murder.”

— V.E. Schwab

353. “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

354. “Divest yourself of weapons, or I will do it for you.”

— V.E. Schwab

355. “Henry’s mouth quirks, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “At least you think I’m good-looking.”

— V.E. Schwab

356. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

358. “I saw an Elephant, in Paris.”

— V.E. Schwab

359. “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

360. “Alucard knew the Maresh palace better than he should. Rhy had shown him a dozen ways in and out; hidden doors and secret halls, a curtain pulled aside to reveal a stairwell, a door set flush with the wall. All the ways a friend could sneak into a room, or a lover into bed.”

— V.E. Schwab

361. “It was like cooking, not baking. Baking took a sense of order. Cooking took a flare, a little art, a little luck.”

— V.E. Schwab

362. “Outside the window, the day just carries on as if nothing’s changed, but it feels like everything has, because Addie LaRue is immortal, and Henry Strauss is damned.”

— V.E. Schwab

363. “We may share an ability, you and I, but that does not make us equals.”

— V.E. Schwab

364. “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

365. “A breeze trickles through the air, carrying as much relief as a dryer vent.”

— V.E. Schwab

366. “And in the morning it looks like ghosts have danced across the kitchen, and they pretend there were two instead of one.”

— V.E. Schwab

367. “Safe does not mean happy, does not mean well, does not mean kind.”

— V.E. Schwab

368. “Anoshe brought solace. And hope. And the strength to let go.”

— V.E. Schwab

369. “The Essen Tasch is itself a kind of lesson,” continued Alucard, “that it doesn’t matter what you call magic, as long as you can believe.”

— V.E. Schwab

370. “And strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules. It’s about knowing how to break them.”

— V.E. Schwab

371. “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

372. “Lila Bard knew in her bones that she was meant to be a pirate. All she needed was a working ship.”

— V.E. Schwab

373. “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

374. “A life worth having is a life worth taking.”

— V.E. Schwab

375. “I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to know if it was real or if I’m expected to grow and wither here for nothing more than superstition. Wouldn’t that be funny? If it were just a story, passed from one Prior to the next until all of us forgot that it was fiction? All of us, given to the same mad delusion?”

— V.E. Schwab

376. “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.”

— V.E. Schwab

377. “A vein of power. An artery.”

— V.E. Schwab

378. “God, it feels good to be wanted. Everywhere he goes, he can feel the ripple, the attention, shifting toward him. Henry leans into the attention, the smiles, the warmth, the light. For the first time he truly understands the concept of being drunk with power.”

— V.E. Schwab

379. “She spins and twirls, and dances partner-less across the snow, laughing at the strange and simple magic of the moment.”

— V.E. Schwab

380. “But Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses. He plants them one by one, like flower bulbs, lets them blossom on her skin.”

— V.E. Schwab

381. “Dreamer is too soft a word. It conjures thoughts of silken sleep, of lazy days in fields of tall grass, of charcoal smudges on soft parchment.”

— V.E. Schwab

382. “She wants to hold the night like a chocolate on her tongue, savor every second before it melts.”

— V.E. Schwab

383. “I’m fine, he says, in that automatic way people always answer when you ask them how they are, even though his heart is hanging open on its hinges.”

— V.E. Schwab

384. “Someone could call themselves a hero and still walk around killing dozens. Someone else could be labeled a villain for trying to stop them. Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human. The difference between Victor and Eli, he suspected, wasn’t their opinion on EOs. It was their reaction to them.”

— V.E. Schwab

385. “We want to prove things, in life, more than we want to disprove them. We want to believe.”

— V.E. Schwab

386. “All her life, she wanted a house and a garden and a room of her own. But tucked inside that want was something else: a family. Parents who smothered her with love. Siblings who teased because they cared. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews – in her mind a family was a sprawling thing, an orchard full of roots and branches.”

— V.E. Schwab

387. “Alucard’s eyes had gone sharp and empty at the same time, as if he were focusing, just on something else, something far away.”

— V.E. Schwab

388. “They always know, they just don’t want to accept the cost. The soul is the easiest thing to trade. It’s the time no one considers.”

— V.E. Schwab

389. “Yes. Because unless you plan to wed me yourself – and don’t get me wrong, I think we’d make a dashing pair – I must try and find a mate.”

— V.E. Schwab

390. “She dragged her head up and saw Kell standing in the road, the strange magical boy in his black coat, looking breathless and angry. Lila couldn’t believe it.”

— V.E. Schwab

391. “Maybe not for you,” said the king. “But time isn’t the same for the mad and the blind.”

— V.E. Schwab

392. “Black curls. Pale eyes. Strong jaw. Sloping shoulders and a cupid’s bow mouth. A man she’d never meet, a life she’d never know, a world she could only dream of.”

— V.E. Schwab

393. “Most people have a shelf of cups. Henry has a wall. They hang from hooks on a mounted rack, five across and seven down. Some of them are patterned and some of them are plain and no two are the same.”

— V.E. Schwab

394. “Normal was such a fragile thing, so easily upset by even good intentions.”

— V.E. Schwab

395. “I apologize for shooting you in the leg,” said Lila. “I was entirely myself.”

— V.E. Schwab

396. “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

397. “But life is pointless without pleasure.”

— V.E. Schwab

398. “Walking beneath the copper canopies, she saw that they were dappled to look like trees, starlight shining through the leaves, and Lila thought, once more, what a strange world she’d stumbled into, and how glad she was to be there.”

— V.E. Schwab

399. “Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.”

— V.E. Schwab

400. “Adeline had wanted to be a tree. To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.”

— V.E. Schwab