Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”

— V.E. Schwab

402. “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

403. “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

404. “An image, distorted by the filter of someone else’s style. But she can see herself in it.”

— V.E. Schwab

405. “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

406. “Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.”

— V.E. Schwab

407. “Go to parties!” said Maggie. “Drink cheap beer! Make bad choices! Date pretty girls!” He leaned back in his chair. “Do pretty girls count as bad choices, or are those two separate things?”

— V.E. Schwab

408. “I see someone who cares,” she says slowly. “Perhaps too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they’re wasting away in a world full of food, because they can’t decide what they want.”

— V.E. Schwab

409. “He is a gruff old man, but Addie likes him. Sees the sadness in his anger, the guardedness of grief.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

412. “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

413. “A cloud passed across King George’s face, and then he simply said, “Time,” as of that one word could be to blame for everything.”

— V.E. Schwab

414. “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

415. “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

416. “This shop is a labyrinth of stacks and shelves, texts stacked two, even three deep, leather beside paper beside board. Her favorite kind of store, one that’s easy to get lost in.”

— V.E. Schwab

417. “She moves among the books as if they’re friends. And perhaps, in a way, they are.”

— V.E. Schwab

418. “Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered?”

— V.E. Schwab

419. “Eli had made a mistake. He wasn’t prone to making mistakes, except where Victor Vale was concerned. Victor had always possessed the unnerving ability to get under Eli’s skin, interrupt his focus.”

— V.E. Schwab

420. “Her hand slid beneath his shirt with all the practiced grace of a thief. But this time she wanted him to feel her touch, her palms gliding over his ribs and around his back, fingertips digging into her shoulder blades.”

— V.E. Schwab

421. “As a matter of habit, more automatic than faith.”

— V.E. Schwab

422. “Because the shadows can’t touch me, and the fallen won’t. Because I’m good with magic, and better with a blade, and I’ve got more power in my blood than you’ve got in this whole damned palace. Because I’ve no qualms about killing, and on top of it all, I’ve got a knack for keeping your sons – both of them – alive.”

— V.E. Schwab

423. “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

424. “Isabelle has since become his wife, and is now ripe with her first child, and worn with all the torments that come with it.”

— V.E. Schwab

425. “And then he closed his eyes. His lips were moving faintly, and even though his hands hung at his sides, Victor knew he was praying. It perplexed him, how someone about to play God could pray to Him, but it clearly didn’t bother his friend.”

— V.E. Schwab

426. “Static as a drawing. Solid as a tomb.”

— V.E. Schwab

427. “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

428. “The doctors gave him a few months, and he told everyone, and do you know what they did? They couldn’t handle it. They were so caught up in their grief, they mourned him before he was even dead. There’s no way to un-know the fact that someone is dying. It eats away all the normal, and leaves something wrong and rotten in its place.”

— V.E. Schwab

429. “Everything casts a shadow. Even the world we live in.”

— V.E. Schwab

430. “A vein of power. An artery.”

— V.E. Schwab

431. “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

432. “How to exist in a world that does not want you. How to be a ghost in someone else’s home.”

— V.E. Schwab

433. “I don’t know what they want from me,” he says. “I don’t know who they want me to be. They tell you to be yourself, but they don’t mean it, and I’m just tired... ” His voice breaks. “I’m tired of falling short. Tired of being... it’s not that I’m alone. I don’t mind being alone. But this–” His fingers knot in his shirtfront. “It hurts.”

— V.E. Schwab

434. “He didn’t want to rule the world. He only wanted to save it. Athos.”

— V.E. Schwab

435. “What are the odds? he thought, even though he knew that the thing about magic was that it bent the odds. But still.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

437. “Her body sang like a tuning fork against his, like finding like.”

— V.E. Schwab

438. “She will grow out of it, her parents say – but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.”

— V.E. Schwab

439. “He assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent lush in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.”

— V.E. Schwab

440. “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

441. “Eli was fascinated by kitchens. By the way people ordered their lives, the cabinets they used, the places they kept food, and the food they choose to keep. He’d spent the last decade studying people, and it was amazing how much could be gleaned from their homes. Their bedrooms, and bathrooms, and closets, of course, but also their kitchens.”

— V.E. Schwab

442. “Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.” “But I don’t want to be in pain,” says Henry hoarsely. “I want – ” “You want to be loved.” A small, empty sound, half cough, half sob. “Yes.”

— V.E. Schwab

443. “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

444. “Cats or dogs?” she asks, instead of “green or blue,” even though there are no dogs or cats on either of them, and Addie says, “cats,” and Sam hands her the tall blue cup without any explanation.”

— V.E. Schwab

445. “We all don clothes that do not fit, and hope we will grow into them.”

— V.E. Schwab

446. “They crashed into each other as if propelled by gravity, and he didn’t know which one of them was the object and which the earth, only that they were colliding. The kiss was Lila pressed into a single gesture. Her brazen pride and her stubborn resolve, her recklessness and her daring and her hunger for freedom. It was all those things, and it took Kell’s breath away.”

— V.E. Schwab

447. “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” he asked Lila now. She looked at him as if it were a strange question. And then she shook her head. “Death comes for everyone,” she said simply. “I’m not afraid of dying. But I am afraid of dying here.” She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city. “I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”

— V.E. Schwab

448. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

450. “Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”

— V.E. Schwab