Top 500 V.E. Schwab Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Overnight Success is almost always a myth. Half this industry is luck, and the other half is the refusal to quit.”

— V.E. Schwab

102. “After all, if you run far enough, no one can catch you.”

— V.E. Schwab

103. “Teaching is an extension of learning, a way to be a perpetual student.”

— V.E. Schwab

104. “There is nowhere you go,” said the Antari to her prince, “that I cannot follow.”

— V.E. Schwab

105. “Palimpsest. She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear it for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present, and think of this moment in Le Mans. A.”

— V.E. Schwab

106. “The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”

— V.E. Schwab

107. “You move among them like a ghost, because you are not one of them. You cannot live like them. You cannot love like them. You cannot belong with them. You belong to me. With me.”

— V.E. Schwab

108. “One time salt, and the next honey, and each designed to cover poison.”

— V.E. Schwab

109. “And then he whispers three words into her hair. “I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.”

— V.E. Schwab

110. “No one suffers as beautifully as you do.”

— V.E. Schwab

111. “You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”

— V.E. Schwab

112. “I can shape death,” he says, gesturing to the conjured figures. “But you can give it life.”

— V.E. Schwab

113. “It is a car crash in slow motion, and Addie knew it was bound to happen, the inevitable collision of people and place, time and circumstance.”

— V.E. Schwab

114. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because visions weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades... Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end... everyone wants to be remembered.”

— V.E. Schwab

115. “Nothing is all good or all bad. Life is so much messier than that.”

— V.E. Schwab

116. “That’s the trouble with March – the warmth never lasts. There’s that narrow stretch when it parades as spring, just enough for you to thaw if you’re sitting in the sun, but then it’s gone. The sun has moved on. The shadows have swept in.”

— V.E. Schwab

117. “You know so little of war. Battles may be fought from the outside in, but wars are won from the inside out.”

— V.E. Schwab

118. “Careful is a calculated risk,” he said. “And I’m very good at making those.”

— V.E. Schwab

119. “And she is tired. Unspeakably tired. But there is no question she has lived. “Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.” And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”

— V.E. Schwab

120. “Outnumbered is not the same as outmatched.”

— V.E. Schwab

121. “So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.”

— V.E. Schwab

122. “Perhaps you are haunting me. What a comforting thought. Maybe it’s you in the darkness.”

— V.E. Schwab

123. “Be lost. Give up. give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be lost And then you will not care if you are ever found.”

— V.E. Schwab

124. “But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten, To remember when know one else does.”

— V.E. Schwab

125. “Humans are capable of such wondrous things. Of cruelty, and war, but also art and invention.”

— V.E. Schwab

126. “She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat.”

— V.E. Schwab

127. “You deserve someone who loves you as you are. the good and the bad and the maddening.”

— V.E. Schwab

128. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.”

— V.E. Schwab

129. “Such is the quandary when it comes to magic, that it is not an issue of strength but of balance. For too little power, and we become weak. Too much, and we become something else entirely.”

— V.E. Schwab

130. “Whatever I am, she thought, pressing her hand to the wall, let it be enough.”

— V.E. Schwab

131. “Purity without balance is its own corruption.”

— V.E. Schwab

132. “I am so happy. I am so scared. The two, it turns out, can walk together, hand in hand.”

— V.E. Schwab

133. “Your freckles look like stars.”

— V.E. Schwab

134. “Home is a choice. Those four words sit alone on a page in her mother’s book, surrounded by so much white space they feel like a riddle. In truth, everything her mother wrote feels like a riddle, waiting to be solved.”

— V.E. Schwab

135. “Life – the way it really is – is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse. – Joseph Brodsky.”

— V.E. Schwab

136. “It will hurt. And it will pass. All things do.”

— V.E. Schwab

137. “Beneath him, sprawled on the tiles, was the lifeless body of Eli Cardale. Eli, who showed up in the hallway sophomore year with a suitcase and a smile. Eli, who believed in God and had a monster inside just like Victor, but knew how to hide it better.”

— V.E. Schwab

138. “Only fools are certain.”

— V.E. Schwab

139. “Here, he is the darkness she met that night. Feral magic in a lover’s form. His edges blur into shadow, his skin the color of moonlight, his eyes the exact shade of the moss behind him. He is wild. But so is she.”

— V.E. Schwab

140. “La vida puede parecer muy larga a veces, pero al final, pasa volando.”

— V.E. Schwab

141. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” “I get the feeling that’s not what Thomas Jefferson meant,” muttered Mitch.”

— V.E. Schwab

142. “These days, everyone’s looking down,” muses Sam. “It’s nice to see someone looking up.”

— V.E. Schwab

143. “This is why I run. Because caring was a thing with claws. It sunk them in and didn’t let go. Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg. More than a few broken ribs. More than anything that bled or broke and healed again. Caring didn’t break you clean. It was a bone that wouldn’t set, a cut that wouldn’t close. It was better not to care... but sometimes people got in.”

— V.E. Schwab

144. “You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”

— V.E. Schwab

145. “It is the seam between winter and spring – though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens.”

— V.E. Schwab

146. “Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don’t want to die – dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were actually doing before wasn’t actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”

— V.E. Schwab

147. “I’m sorry I left. I’m sorry. But I’m here now, so you can’t die,” he said, his voice finally breaking. “Don’t you see how rude that would be, when I’ve come so far?”

— V.E. Schwab

148. “The darkness whispers in her ear, arms wrapped like a scarf around her throat. I am always with you.”

— V.E. Schwab

149. “You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”

— V.E. Schwab

150. “Some people are repelled by darkness. Others are drawn to it, to the static crackle of power in a place. To the hum of magic, or the presence of the dead. They can see these forces staining the world like ink in water.”

— V.E. Schwab