Holly Black Quotes

“What could I become if I stopped worrying about death, about pain, about anything? If I stopped trying to belong? Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear.”

“Have I told you how hideous you look tonight?” Cardan asks, leaning back in the elaborately carved chair, the warmth of his words turning the question into something like a compliment. “No” I say, glad to be annoyed back into the present. “Tell me.” “I can’t.”

“Many nights I drifted off to sleep to his rumbling voice reading from a book of battle strategy. And despite myself, despite what he’d done and what he was, I came to love him. It’s just not a comfortable kind of love.”

“Because you’re like a story that hasn’t happened yet. Because I want to see what you will do. I want to be part of the unfolding of the tale.”

“Let’s have a toast. To the incompetence of our enemies.”

“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.”

“Nice things don’t happen in storybooks,” Taryn says. “Or when they do happen, something bad happens next. Because otherwise the story would be boring, and no one would read it.”

I can be charming. I charmed you, didn’t I?

“Most of all, I hate you because I think of you. Often. It’s disgusting, and I can’t stop.”

“If you hurt me, I wouldn’t cry. I would hurt you back.”

“I am going to keep on defying you. I am going to shame you with my defiance. You remind me that I am a mere mortal and you are a prince of Faerie. Well, let me remind you that means you have much to lose and I have nothing. You may win in the end, you may ensorcell me and hurt me and humiliate me, but I will make sure you lose everything I can take from you on the way down. I promise you this is the least of what I can do.”

“There’s always something left to lose.”

“But I will not stand in front of your happiness. I will not even stand in front of misery that you choose for yourself.”

“Father, I am what you made me. I’ve become your daughter after all.”

“That’s what comes of hungering for something; you forget to check if it’s rotten before you gobble it down.”

“Before, I never knew how far I would go. Now I believe I have the answer. I will go as far as there is to go. I will go way too far.”

“He’s flint, you’re tinder.”

“There you are,” Cardan says as I take my place beside him. “How has the night been going for you? Mine has been full of dull conversation about how my head is going to find itself on a spike.”

“Desire is an odd thing. As soon as it’s sated, it transmutes. If we receive golden thread, we desire the golden needle.”

“We don’t need to be good. But let’s try to be fair.”

“I am tired of caring,” I say. “Why should I?” “Because they could kill you!” “They better,” I say to her. “Because anything less than that isn’t going to work.”

“I stand in front of my window and imagine myself a fearless knight, imagine myself a witch who hid her heart in her finger and then chopped her finger off.”

“He rises from the throne. “Come, have a seat.” His voice is replete with danger, lush with menace. The flowering branches have sprouted thorns so thickly that petals are barely visible. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” he asks. “What you sacrificed everything for. Go on. It’s all yours.”

“He looks like a faerie lover stepped out of a ballad, the kind where no good comes to the girl who runs away with him.”

“No matter how careful I am, eventually I’ll make another misstep. I am weak. I am fragile. I am mortal.”

It all starts when Jared Grace finds their great uncle’s book, ‘Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastic World Around You’ and the Grace kids realize that they are not alone in their new house. Now the kids want to tell their story but the faeries will do everything they can to stop them.

“My greatest weakness has always been my desire for love. It is a yawning chasm within me, and the more that I reach for it, the more easily I am tricked.”

“Have you never dreamed of someone coming to you and telling you that you were no mortal child, but one made of magic? Have you never dreamed about being taken from your pathetic little life to one of vast greatness?”

“If being a queen doesn’t suit you, worthless child, then find your own fortune.”

“You’d be a fool to trust the former queen of the Court of Teeth.”

“It is hard to explain the savagery of hope.”

“And for a moment, I am viciously glad. It doesn’t feel good exactly, to be in danger, but it does feel good to be the cause of events rather than being swept along into them.”

“A small smile turns up a corner of my mouth. I feel the sharpness of my teeth and roll my tongue over them. For the first time, I like the feeling.”

“I, who have had little power in my life, must be on guard against that feeling. Power goes to my head too quickly, like faerie wine.”

“Power is infectious. Power is greedy.”

“Nothing is sweeter, but that which is scarce.”

“I want to be anyone but the person I am.”

“It is said we learn more from our failures than our successes.”

“I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear. Your heart beats fast. Your senses are heightened. You grow light-headed, maybe even dizzy.”

“Fear is terrible, but the combination of hope and fear is worse.”

“Power is the ability to get what you want. Power is the ability to be the one making the decisions.”

“When I’m with him, I feel like the hero of a story, of my story.”

“Watching my back is the perfect opportunity to stick a knife in it.”