Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

403. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

409. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

411. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

413. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

415. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

419. “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

420. “Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

422. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

424. “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

425. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

427. “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

428. “ExtraOrdinary. The word that started – ruined, changed – everything.”

— V.E. Schwab

429. “I belong wherever I choose.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

432. “No, Sydney,” he said. “I need you to stay here.” “Why?” she asked. “Because you don’t think I’m a bad person,” he said. “And I don’t want to prove you wrong.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

434. “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

435. “Look, everyone talks about the unknown like it’s some big scary thing, but it’s the familiar that’s always bothered me. It’s heavy, builds up around you like rocks, until it’s walls and a ceiling and a cell.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

437. “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

438. “Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.”

— V.E. Schwab

439. “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

440. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

442. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

445. “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

446. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

448. “Her mother wishes she was more like Isabelle Therault, sweet and kind and utterly incurious, content to keep her eyes down upon her knitting instead of looking up at clouds, instead of wondering what’s around the bend, over the hills. But Adeline does not know how to be like Isabelle. She does not want to be like Isabelle.”

— V.E. Schwab

449. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab