The Cruel Prince 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.”