Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty is such a heavy thing.”

— V.E. Schwab

402. “Death comes for us all,” said Holland evenly. “I would simply have mine mean something.”

— V.E. Schwab

403. “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

404. “Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses.”

— V.E. Schwab

405. “It is so strange, to see her face reflected, distorted, echoed in so many others. Here is the line of her cheek and the curve of her mouth. Here is the angle of her eye and the slope of her nose. The details scattered like seeds across the portraits. She has never had a family, and now she has a tree.”

— V.E. Schwab

406. “Kell would say it was impossible. What a useless word, in a world with magic.”

— V.E. Schwab

407. “That we could be more. Hell, we could be heroes.” “We could be dead,” said Eli. “That’s a risk everyone takes by living.”

— V.E. Schwab

408. “Seeping in through his clothes and his skin until it was gone – or not gone. Absorbed.”

— V.E. Schwab

409. “After all, the darkness only looked the way he did because of her. She’d given him that shape, chosen what to make of him, what to see. “Don’t you remember?” She told him then, “When you were nothing but shadow and smoke?”

— V.E. Schwab

410. “I belong wherever I choose.”

— V.E. Schwab

411. “It seemed like a good plan, or at least, like the best of several bad ones. But.”

— V.E. Schwab

412. “And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.”

— V.E. Schwab

413. “This is a dream. It would be so easy to climb inside, to stay until it felt real, to never wake up.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

415. “Are you afraid yet? Are you afraid?”

— V.E. Schwab

416. “They look at you and see whatever they want. Because they don’t see you at all.”

— V.E. Schwab

417. “You look at me, Kell, and think we are alike. That we are the same, even, one person on two divergent paths. Perhaps you think our power bonds us. Allow me to correct your misapprehension. We may share an ability, you and I, but that does not make us equals.”

— V.E. Schwab

418. “She knows too well what’s it like when people take one weakness and define you by it.”

— V.E. Schwab

419. “She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat. She missed the sound of his voice, the knowing in his touch, the flint-on-stone friction of their conversations, the way they fit together.”

— V.E. Schwab

420. “She swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel. But that way lies madness, and she has learned not to follow.”

— V.E. Schwab

421. “Faith. It seemed a shallow substitution, but Kell supposed he couldn’t blame the Grey-worlders. Everyone needed to believe in something, and without magic, they has settled for a lesser god. One full of holes and mysteries and made-up rules. The irony was that they had abandoned magic long before it abandoned them, smothered it with this almighty God of theirs.”

— V.E. Schwab

422. “If she had been kinder, softer, or perhaps if she had simply lived another life, another time.”

— V.E. Schwab

423. “It is not as still as death, not as empty, or calm. There is a violence to this blind black void. It is birds’ wings beating against her skin. It is the rush of the wind in her hair. It is a thousand whispering voices. It is fear, and falling, and it is a feral, wild feeling, and by the time she thinks to scream, the darkness has peeled away again, the night has re-formed, and Luc is once again beside her.”

— V.E. Schwab

424. “She’d ben teasing, but he clearly wasn’t.”

— V.E. Schwab

425. “Lila was nineteen. Nineteen, and every one of the years felt carved into her.”

— V.E. Schwab

426. “Brother,” said Rhy, holding him tight. And unlike the coat, and all the other trappings of Kell’s old life, this one, at least, still fit.”

— V.E. Schwab

427. “Names are important,” she said, twirling the cord. “Mine is Ojka, and I have orders to keep you out.” Beyond the doors, Kell let out a scream of frustration, a sob of pain. “My name is Lila Bard,” she answered, drawing her favorite knife, “and I don’t give a damn.”

— V.E. Schwab

428. “The people fed on the magic and the magic fed on them until it ate their bodies and their minds and then their souls.”

— V.E. Schwab

429. “It’s just a door. Not a period, An elipsis. A to-be-continued.”

— V.E. Schwab

430. “It is such a grand word, soul. Like god, like time, like space, and when she’s tried to picture it, she’s conjured images of lightning, or sunbeams through dust, of storms the shape of human forms, of vast and edgeless white. The truth is so much smaller.”

— V.E. Schwab

431. “You’re the hero... ,” she said, finding his eyes,“... of your own story anyway.”

— V.E. Schwab

432. “The darkness plays its own game,” she says. “It makes its own rules,” she says. “And you have lost.”

— V.E. Schwab

433. “Magic is tangled, so you must be smooth. Magic is wild, so you must be tame. Magic is chaos, so you must be calm. Are you calm, Kell?”

— V.E. Schwab

434. “The darkness turns on Addie, then, and there is no vestige of Luc in the roiling smoke. There are no green eyes. No playful smirk. Nothing but a menacing void, a shadow filled with teeth. It has been a long time since Addie felt true fear. Sadness, she knows; loneliness and grief. But fear belongs to those with more to lose. And yet. Staring into that dark, Addie is afraid.”

— V.E. Schwab

435. “A successful theft is an anonymous act. The absence of a mark.”

— V.E. Schwab

436. “Once you know about a thing, you start to see it everywhere.”

— V.E. Schwab

437. “She’d waged freedom. She’d wanted adventure. And she didn’t think she minded dying for it. She only wished dying didn’t hurt so much.”

— V.E. Schwab

438. “The humor, along with that horrible false cheer and fake smile, was gone, wiped away. In a way, Eli wasn’t quite as frightening, because she’d always been able to see the monster in his eyes. Now it had finally stopped hiding.”

— V.E. Schwab

439. “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

440. “Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet.”

— V.E. Schwab

441. “Bea insists that everyone who works in a bookstore wants to be a writer, but Henry’s never fancied himself a novelist. Sure, he’s tried putting pen to paper, but it never really works. He can’t find the words, the story, the voice. Can’t figure out what he could possibly add to so many shelves. Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.”

— V.E. Schwab

442. “Feral magic in a lover’s form.”

— V.E. Schwab

443. “There is George Therault, and Roger’s oldest daughter, and Isabelle’s two sons, and the next time Addie comes, they will all be dead, the last of her old life – her first life – buried in the same ten-meter plot.”

— V.E. Schwab

444. “The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but the shade still belongs to winter, so Addie follows the light, sinking onto a grassy slope beneath the cloudless sky.”

— V.E. Schwab

445. “It’s a long-running sore point between them, the fact that Henry isn’t gay, that he’s attracted to a person first and their gender second. Robbie cringes, but doesn’t apologize.”

— V.E. Schwab

446. “My name is Adeline LaRue, she tells herself. My father taught me how to be a dreamer, and my mother taught me how to be a wife, and Estele taught me how to speak to gods.”

— V.E. Schwab

447. “What do you think your London did, when the darkness came? When Osaron’s magic consumed his world, and threatened to take ours with it? You traded away our world’s safety for your own, locked the doors and trapped us between the raging water and the rocks. How does it feel now?”

— V.E. Schwab

448. “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

449. “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

450. “A vein of power. An artery.”

— V.E. Schwab