Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Lila,” he said, and there was so much sadness in his voice, she suddenly realized she didn’t want to hear his answer, didn’t want to think of all the ways their story could end, of the chance that none of them would make it out alive, intact. She didn’t want to think beyond this boat, this moment, so she kissed him, deeply, and whatever he was going to say, it died on his lips as they met hers.”

— V.E. Schwab

402. “People survived by being cautious, but they got ahead by being bold.”

— V.E. Schwab

403. “Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”

— V.E. Schwab

404. “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

405. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

407. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

409. “He’d seen enough nature specials on the common room set to know that prey had eyes on the sides of their head, were constantly on guard, but predators’ eyes were forward-facing, close together, unafraid.”

— V.E. Schwab

410. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

412. “Sleep is such a mercy.”

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

429. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

431. “A vein of power. An artery.”

— V.E. Schwab

432. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

434. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

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

— V.E. Schwab

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— V.E. Schwab

445. “Do you know how to live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”

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

— V.E. Schwab

450. “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