Victoria Schwab
V. E. Schwab is an American fantasy author best known for her 2013 novel Vicious, the Shades of Magic series, and her children’s and young adult fiction books published under the name Victoria Schwab. (V. E. Schwab Quotes)
“A death is traumatic. Vivid enough to mark any surface, to burn in like light on photo paper.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“A game is worth playing if you stand a chance at winning.”
V. E. Schwab
The Steel Prince
“A life worth having is a life worth taking.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“A man is not a cause, and a cause is not a man.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“A myth without a voice is like a dandelion without a breath of wind. No way to spread the seeds.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“A person chose their path. Or they made a new one.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“A promise you can’t keep is just another lie.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“A queen could leave her throne. But a mother never leaves her son.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“A respectable prison is still a prison.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“A throne of wood and a false title does not make you queen of anything.”
V. E. Schwab
The Steel Prince
“A woman must take responsibility for her own education, for no man truly will.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“All Eli had to do was smile. All Victor had to do was lie. Both proved frighteningly effective.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“And after ten years of waiting, it was Victor’s turn, to get into Eli’s head and do some ruining.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“And besides, if my soul’s impeccable taste in music throws you off, then learn to tune me out.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“And every second you don’t look, your mind just makes it worse because in the end, what you don’t see is always scarier than what you do.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“And perhaps that was the test of faith, to know, and not to say, to live with knowing, and let the truth live only in one’s head.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“And strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules. It’s about knowing how to break them.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“And this, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up. It is a door left open.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Anger flared through him, but anger was unproductive so he twisted it into pragmatism while he searched for a flaw.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Anoshe was a word for strangers in the street, and lovers between meetings, for parents and children, friends and family. It softened the blow of leaving. Eased the strain of parting. A careful nod to the certainty of today, the mystery of tomorrow. When a friend left, with little chance of seeing home, they said anoshe. When a loved one was dying, they said anoshe. When corpses were burned, bodies given back to the earth and souls to the stream, those left grieving said anoshe. Anoshe brought solace. And hope. And the strength to let go.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“As she taped up her latest cuts, she wondered if, somewhere, there was a version of herself having fun. Feet up on the back of a theater seat while movie monsters slunk out of the shadows, and people in the audience screamed because it was fun to be afraid when you knew you were safe.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“Ask nice. Play nice. Marcella was so fucking tired of nice.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“At the sunroom doors, he cast a glance back, and found Rhy looking at him with an expression that might have been I’m sorry, but also could have been fuck off, or at the very least we’ll talk later.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“August found himself nodding, even though he spent most of his time afraid. Afraid of what he was, afraid of what he wasn’t, afraid of unraveling, becoming something else, becoming nothing.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“Back home, a good storm would wash the world clean, leave it smelling crisp and new. But it seems nothing can rinse the grime from the streets of Paris. If anything, that storm has only made things worse, the world wet and dull, puddles brown with mud and filth.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“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
Vicious
“Because the only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“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
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Because truth wasn’t the same thing as fact. It was personal.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“Because you don’t think I’m a bad person,” he said. “And I don’t want to prove you wrong.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. But when you’re the only one holding on to an idea, a memory, a girl, it’s hard to keep it from floating away.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Belief is not a blanket, Cassidy. It doesn’t cover everything. Forgive me. There’s a big difference between believing in the supernatural in the general sense and believing the twelve-year-old girl you’re escorting across Paris is a ghost hunter with a dead sidekick.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“Better to be friendly, without being friends.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives or to find strength in a very long one.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“But after a year of tiptoeing through our lives, trying not to set off memories like landmines.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“But it’s easy not to care what other people think when none of them can see you.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“But once you know, you can’t go back. Not really. You can carve out someone’s memories, but they won’t be who they were before. They’ll just be full of holes. Given the choice, I’d rather learn to live with what I know.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“But the teacher had been right about one thing: violence breeds. Someone pulls a trigger, sets off a bomb, drives a bus full of tourists off a bridge, and what’s left in the wake isn’t just she’ll casings, wreckage, bodies. There’s something else. Something bad. An aftermath. A recoil. A reaction to all that anger and pain and death.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“But these words people threw around – humans, monsters, heroes, villains – to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics. 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.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Calling the Tuileries a garden is like calling Hogwarts a school.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“Caring about someone is scary, Mac. I know. Especially when you’ve lost people. It’s easy to think it’s not worth it. It’s easy to think life will hurt less if you don’t. But it’s not life unless you care about it.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“Caring was a thing with claws. It sank 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 didn’t set, a cut that wouldn’t close.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy. Sympathy leads to hesitation. Hesitation will get you killed.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Death comes for us all,” said Holland evenly. “I would simply have mine mean something.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Do not mistake this kindness. I simply want to be the one who breaks you.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Doesn’t do much good,” she’d said, “to fear one kind of death and not another.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke? Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Doubt is like a current you have to swim against, one that saps your strength.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“Dressing up is just like watching cartoons, something you enjoyed as a kid, before it passes through the no man’s land of teen angst, the ironic age of early twenties. And then somehow, miraculously, it crosses back into the realm of the genuine, the nostalgic. A place reserved for wonder.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Dying doesn’t help dead. It doesn’t find the lost.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Embrace your strange, dear daughter. Where’s the fun in being normal?”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“Every end may be a new beginning, but every beginning had to end.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Every time I get nervous or scared, I remind myself that every good story needs twists and turns. Every heroine needs an adventure.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“Every weakness exposes flesh,” he’d said, “and flesh invites a knife.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“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
A Gathering of Shadows
“Everything changes. It is the nature of the world. Nothing stays the same.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Everything is valuable, in its own way. Everything is full of history.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Fear is a strange thing. It has the power to make people close their eyes, turn away. Nothing good grows out of fear.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“First comes mischief, then comes menace, then mayhem. The more trouble poltergeists cause, the more powerful they get.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“Florence is all odd shapes and sharp edges, domes and spires, white stone walls and copper-slated roofs. It is a place painted in a different palette, music played in a different chord.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“For one, dazzling, infinite moment, August felt like he was standing on a precipice, the end of one world and the beginning of another, a whisper and a bang.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“For the ones who dream of stranger worlds.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Free caffeine and sugar, a recipe for making friends.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Freedom is a pair of trousers and a buttoned coat. A man’s tunic and a tricorne hat. If only she had known. The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Funny how when we start to tell a secret, we can’t stop. Something falls open in us, and the sheer momentum of letting go pushes us on.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Good and bad were weak words. Monsters didn’t care about intentions or ideals. The facts were simple. The South was chaos. The North was order. It was an order bought and paid for with blood and fear, but order all the same.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“Having something and losing it, it’s so much crueler than never having had it.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“He could be the monster if it kept others human.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“He dreamed of her hand tangling in his, a pulse of power twining them together. He dreamed of them racing through foreign streets, not the London ones they’d navigated, but crooks and bends in places he’d never been, and ones he might never see. But there she was, at his side, pulling him toward freedom.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“He fought the men and he slayed the monsters and he bested the gods, and at last the hero, having conquered all, earned the thing that he wanted most. To go home.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“He leans in, resting his weathered hand on the bed. “Treat all the bad things like dreams, Kenzie. That way, no matter how scary or dark they get, you just have to survive until you wake up.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“He manages a sad smile. “An omission is not the same thing as a lie, Miss Bishop. It’s a manipulation.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“He seems happier, lighter, after sharing his story. I feel a little heavier after hearing it, but that’s okay. That’s how friendship works. You learn to share the weight.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“He wanted to care, he wanted to care so badly, but there was this gap between what he felt and what he wanted to feel, a space where something important had been carved out.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“He wasn’t made of flesh and bone, or starlight. He was made of darkness.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“He wished for the first time in his life that he believed in God.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Hesitation is the death of advantage.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“His heart has a draft. It lets in light. lets in storms. It lets in everything.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“History is history. It is past. And private.’ With that, she shuts the door in my face.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“History is something you look back on, not something you really feel at the time. In the moment, you’re just living.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“How many men would she have to turn to dust before one took her seriously?”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Humanity was messy. For the majority of his short life, he’d thought of people as either food or bad, clean or stained – the separation stark, the lines drawn in black and white – but the last six months had shown him a multitude of grays.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“I am a horrible hollow kind of tired; all I want is quiet and rest.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“I am not afraid of nightmares, because mine came true and I lived through them.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, i divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“I don’t know who I am, and who I’m not, I don’t know who I’m supposed to be, and I miss who I was; I miss it every day, Kate, but there’s no place for that August anymore. No place for the version of me who wanted to go to school, and have a life, and feel human, because this world doesn’t need that August. It needs someone else.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“I don’t want to survive. I want to thrive.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“I feel connected to you, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that being severed. Lost.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“I have never known what to make of you. Not since the day we met. And it terrifies me. You terrify me. And the idea of you walking away again, vanishing from my life, that terrifies me most of all.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“I know you’re supposed to want to be one of the popular kids, but the truth is, I never have. It just seems like it would be exhausting, trying to keep up with all the rules.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“I left a ball of Oreo filling out for months one time. It never got hard. Lot of unnatural things in the world.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“I live in a world where shadows have teeth. It’s not a particularly relaxing environment.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“I mean, most people want to escape. Get out of their heads. Out of their lives. Stories are the easiest way to do that.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“I pull the key from around my neck and slip it into the hole beneath my brother’s card. It doesn’t turn. It never turns. But I never stop trying.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“I want the things most people don’t notice. The ring and the key and the way you have of wearing everything on the inside.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“I want to believe that there’s more. That we could be more. Hell, we could be heroes.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“I wanted us to do this, together. I’m not a fucking coat, Marcus. You don’t get to check me at the door.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“I watch him fight back a smile and lose. What comes through isn’t smug, or even crooked. It’s proud. And I can’t help it. I smile a little too.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“I’d rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“I’m willing to walk in darkness if it keeps humans in the light.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“Ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“If a thing was worth having, it was worth taking.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“If he weren’t currently in the back of a cop car, he would have wanted to make a thesis note.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“If he’d had to judge based on the two of them, then ExtraOrdinaries were damaged, to say the least. But these words people threw around–humans, monsters, heroes, villains–to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“If magic coursed through everyone and everything, was that what it felt like when it found itself again?”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“If Mom was feeling ambitious, she scribbled a small list of items beneath the word, but seeing as her handwriting is virtually illegible, we won’t know what’s in each box until we actually open it. Like Christmas. Except we already own everything.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“If she’d learned anything from her father, it was that composure was control. Even if it was just an illusion.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“If these men worshipped anything, they worshipped magic, which she supposed would be heresy back in Grey London. But then again, Christians worshipped an old man in the sky, and if Lila had to say which one seemed more real at the moment, she’d have to side with magic.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Ignorance is only bliss if you want to get caught.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“It doesn’t matter what someone is. Only what they think they are.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“It had neither one side, which would be conventional, nor two, which would be unexpected, but several, which was, of course, impossible.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“It is an arrogant man that thinks himself a god. And an arrogant god, thought Tieren, looking to the window, that thinks himself a man.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“It is just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“It takes at least three assassination attempts to scare me off. And even then, if there are baked goods involved, I might come back.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“It was a cruel trick of the universe, thought August, that he only felt human after doing something monstrous.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“It was a cycle of whimpers and bangs, gruesome beginnings and bloody ends.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“It was a game she sometimes played, ever since she learned about the theory of infinite parallels, the idea that a person’s path through life wasn’t really a line, but a tree, every decision a divergent branch, resulting in a divergent you.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“It was like cooking, not baking. Baking took a sense of order. Cooking took a flare, a little art, a little luck. This kind of cooking took a lot of luck.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“It’s not that Mom didn’t keep anything, it’s that she kept the wrong things. We leave memories on objects we love and cherish, things we use and wear down.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“It’s hard to believe in ghosts, until you see one, and then it’s hard not to.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“It’s important to take care of the past. To revisit it, to study and learn. Understanding the past helps us move through the present and discover the future.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“Kell swept Lila up into his arms, amazed at her lightness. She took up so much space in the world—in his world—it was hard to imagine her being so slight. In his mind, she was made of stone.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Kell would say it was impossible. What a useless word, in a world with magic.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Knowledge may be power, but money buys both.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Life isn’t made of choices, it’s made of trades. Some are good, some are bad, but they all have a cost.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Life, the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good, but between Bad and Worse. —Joseph Brodsky”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Look, everyone talks about the unknown like it’s some big scary thing, but it’s the familiar that’s always bothered me. It’s heavy, builds up around you like rocks, until it’s walls and a ceiling and a cell.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Looking for trouble, he’d say. You’re gonna look till you find it. Trouble is the looker, she’d answer. It keeps looking till it finds you. Might as well find it first.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Love and loss,” he said, “are like a ship and the sea. They rise together. The more we love, the more we have to lose. But the only way to avoid loss is to avoid love. And what a sad world that would be.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Love doesn’t keep us from freezing to death, or starving, or being knifed for the coins in our pocket. Love doesn’t buy us anything, so be glad for what you have and who you have because you may want for things but you need for nothing.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Lying is easy. But it’s lonely.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Magda looks at me as if I’ve gone mad. Or I’ve grown up. It’s kind of the same thing.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“Magic bent the world. Pulled it into shape. There were fixed points. Most of the time those points were places. But sometimes, rarely, they were people.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Magic made everything feel so impermanent, it was easy to forget that some things, once changed, could never be undone. That not everything was either changeable or infinite. Some roads kept going, and others had an end.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Magic made things simple. Sometimes, thought, it made things too simple.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Maybe is a rope in a hole, or the key to a door. Maybe is how you find the way out.”
V. E. Schwab
“Maybe one day the words will pour out like so many others, easy and smooth and on their own. Right now they take pieces of me with them.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“Maybe we are broken. But we put ourselves back together. We survived. That’s what makes us so powerful. And as for family—well, blood is always family, but family doesn’t always have to be blood.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Men look at anyone with power and see only a threat, an obstacle in their path. They never have the sense to see power for what it really is. Potential.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Men who waded into waters claiming they could swim should not need a raft.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Monsters were born from monstrous acts. But here were monstrous acts without the monstrous aftermath. The only aftermath, in fact, appeared to be the creature itself, the violence fed back into its source, leaving nothing but bodies in its wake.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“More of a cookie person, myself. No offense to the other baked goods. I just like cookies.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Mourning was its own kind of music—the sound of so many hearts, of so many breaths, of so many standing together.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“My camera was on the bedside table, the purple strap frayed and the viewfinder cracked. It was damaged but not ruined, changed but not destroyed. Kind of like me. A little special. A little strange.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“My father made the grave mistake of sending me away to school, and the more I read, the more I thought, and the more I thought, the more I knew I had to be in Paris. This is where the thinkers are. This is where the dreamers live.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“My father taught me how to track, how to read the ground and the trees. He taught me that everything has a language, that if you knew the language, you could make the world talk. The grass and the dirt hold secrets, he’d say. The wind and the water carry stories and warnings.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“My father was a vulture. My mother was a magpie. My oldest brother is a crow. My sister, a sparrow. I have never really been a bird.” Lila resisted the urge to say he might have been a peacock. It didn’t seem the time.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Myths do not happen all at once. They do not spring forth whole into the world. They form slowly, rolled between the hands of time until their edges smooth, until the saying of the story gives enough weight to the words—to the memories—to keep them rolling on their own.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“Ninth rule of friendship,” he says, “ghost-watching is a two-person sport.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“No shame in being scared. But there’s a difference between being scared and being scared away.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“Not with a bang, but with a whimper. In with gunfire and out with smoke.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“Nothing happens until it happens, and then it’s already happening.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“Nothing is all good or all bad. Life is so much messier than that.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“One adventure at a time.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“One day you will be old and wrinkled, and I will still love you.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“One foot in winter and one in spring. One foot with the living and one with the dead.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“One of the cardinal rules of lying is to never, if it can be prevented, involve someone else in your story, because you can’t control them. Which is why I want to punch myself when the lie that falls from my lips is, “To hang out with Wesley.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Only fools and cowards scorned fear. Fear keeps you alive.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“Our memories change, too. (For instance, I swear the teddy bear I had growing up was green, but according to my parents it was orange.) But when you take a photograph, things stay still. The way that they were, is the way that they are, is the way that they will always be. Which is why I love pictures.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“People are users. It’s a universal truth. Use them, or they’ll use you.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“People think that ghosts only come out at night, or on Halloween, when the world is dark and the walls are thin. But the truth is, ghosts are everywhere. In the bread aisle at your grocery store, in the middle of you grandmother’s garden, in the front seat on your bus. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“People were messy. They were defined not only by what they’d done, but by what they would have done, under different circumstances, molded as much by their regrets as their actions, choices they stood by and those they wished they could undo.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“Perhaps she was glass. But glass is only brittle until it breaks. Then it’s sharp.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Picking the best solution really depended on your definition of best.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Politics is a dance until the moment it becomes a war. And we control the music.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Power in Balance. Balance in Power.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Scars are not shameful, not unless you let them be. If you do not wear them, they will wear you.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“She bent most of the rules. She broke the rest.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“She bounces off with all the enthusiasm of someone rushing toward cake, not corpses.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“She used to think that if she stole enough, the want would fade, the hunger would go away, but maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of what she didn’t have, of what she wasn’t, but what she was.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Sight is an important thing, August. Without it, our minds invent, and the things they invent are almost always worse than the truth. It’s important that they see us. See you. It’s important that they know you’re on their side.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Some people steal to stay alive, and some steal to feel alive. Simple as that.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Some people were matches, a bit of light and no heat. And some were furnaces, all heat but little light. And then, once in a blue moon, there was a bonfire, something so hot and bright you couldn’t stand too near without burning.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“Some thought magic came from the mind, others the soul, or the heart, or the will. But Kell knew it came from the blood.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Sometimes help is a place and sometimes it’s a person, and sometimes it’s a bit of both.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“Standing there on display was painful enough. Now came the truly unfortunate task of socializing.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Stare too long at anything and you start to wonder. And where does wondering get you? Nowhere good.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“Stories have power,” she says. “So long as you believe them.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“Strength and weakness are tangled things,” the Aven Essen had said. “They look so much alike, we often confuse them, the way we confuse magic and power.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“That’s what he told himself, over and over and over until he believed it, because truth wasn’t the same thing as fact. It was personal.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“The absence of pain led to an absence of fear, and the absence of fear led to a disregard for consequence.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“The Archive makes us monsters. And then it breaks the ones who get too strong, and buries the ones who know too much.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“The Archive means that the past is never gone. Never lost. Knowing that, it’s freeing. It gave me permission to always look forward. After all, we have our own Histories to write.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“The beautiful thing about books was that anyone could open them.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“The first trick to lying is to tell the truth as often as possible. If out start lying about everything, big and small, it becomes impossible to keep things straight and you’ll get caught. Once suspicion is planted it becomes exponentially harder to sell the next lie.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“The funny thing about armor is that it doesn’t just keep other people out. It keeps us in. We build it up around us, not realizing that we’re trapping ourselves.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“The idea that if a thing went unsaid, it didn’t really exist, because words had power, words gave weight and shape and force, and the withholding of them could keep a thing from being real.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“The key to all things be they magical or alcoholic, is moderation.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“The life I had is gone. There’s no getting it back. I’d rather make a new one. A better one. One where I don’t have to pretend to be weak to survive.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“The living may take strength from love and hope, but the dead grow strong on darker things. On pain and anger and regret.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“The morning is a stealthy hunter, my father used to say. It sneaks up quiet and quick on the night and overtakes it.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“The next time you point a gun at someone, make sure you’re ready to pull the trigger.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“The only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“The people fed on the magic and the magic fed on them until it ate their bodies and their minds and then their souls.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“The perfectly good car comes with a perfectly dangerous girl.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“The prince shrugged. “Who needs magic when you look this good?”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“The silliest things shatter you. A T-shirt discovered behind the washing machine. A toy that rolled under a cabinet in the garage, forgotten until someone drops something and goes to fetch it, and suddenly they’re on the concrete floor sobbing into a dusty baseball mitt.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“The trees all whisper, leaves gossiping. The stones are heavy thinkers, the sullen silent types. He used to make up stories for everything in nature, giving it all voices, lives. If the moor wind ever sings, you mustn’t listen, not with all of your ears. Use only the edges. Listen the way you’d look out the corners of your eyes. The wind is lonely, love, and always looking for company.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“The wind took hold of whatever I felt, and ran away with it.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“The witch’s words rage in my ears, “Don’t you dare disturb my garden.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“The world is full of noise. And finding quiet isn’t about pushing everything out. It’s just about pulling yourself in.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“The world is neither fair nor right, but it has a way of balancing itself.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“The worst thing you can do in a fight is stop moving. When someone attacks, they create force, movement, momentum, but you’ll be okay as long as you can see and feel the direction of that force and travel with it.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“There have been times when I’ve wavered. When I thought maybe I wanted to be normal. But the thing is, what we do, it’s in our blood. It’s who we are. Normal wouldn’t fit us, even if we wanted to wear it.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“There was a strange place, between knowing and not knowing. A place where things could live in the back of your head without weighing down your heart.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“There was difference between the inability to lie and the need to speak the truth.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“There were a hundred shades between a truth and lie, and she knew them all.”
V. E. Schwab
A Conjuring of Light
“There were two kinds of monsters, the kind that hunted the streets and the kind that lived in your head. She could fight the first, but the second was more dangerous. It was always, always, always a step ahead.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“There would be a time to call the music. Time to summon the souls.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“There’s nothing you can do. They were her five least favorite words. When Zhong had fallen, she’d heard them. When her father had died, she’d heard them.”
V. E. Schwab
Broken Ground
“There’s one kind of lie even you can tell. Do you know what it is?” She met his gaze in the steel doors. “The kind you tell yourself.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“There’s a big difference between can’t and won’t.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“There’s a difference between wanting to stay and being too afraid to let go.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“These days, everyone left a digital mark. All day, every day at Colton, people were snapping photos, recording every mundane moment as if it deserved to be preserved, remembered.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“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
A Gathering of Shadows
“Time isn’t the same for the mad and the blind.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“Understanding the past helps us move through the present and discover the future.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“Usually, she’s tucked in the corner of a coffee shop, dreaming up stories.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“Victor didn’t want to run while Eli was busy trying to fly.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Waiting for something to start is always worse than when it does.”
V. E. Schwab
The Dark Vault
“War needed both kinds of people—those who played the long game and those who played the short one.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“We are the darkest acts made light.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“We can’t all turn blood and whispers into weapons.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“We do it, Jackson, because compassion must be louder than pride.”
V. E. Schwab
Our Dark Duet
“We protect the past. And the way I see it, that means we need to understand it.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“What a waste of life, to stand around and think so much on every little thing.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“What you can’t see is always scarier than what you can. Your eyes play tricks on you, filling in the shadows, making shapes.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“When he touches me there is nothing but touch. There is no thought of wrong and no through of loss and no thought of anything, because thoughts can’t get through the static.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“When I was small, the wind sang me lullabies. Lilting, humming, high-pitched things, filling the space around me so that even when all seemed quiet, it wasn’t. This is a wind I have lived with.”
V. E. Schwab
The Near Witch
“When you think about it, it’s really all anyone ever wants. Once upon a time, power was determined by lineage—the age of blood. Then it was determined by money—the age of gold. But I think it’s time for a new age, Victor. The age of power itself.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“When no one understands, that’s usually a good sign that you’re wrong.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“Whenever she felt the weight of those bonds, she wished she could take her sharpest knife and cut them free, carve out the part of her that wanted, that cared, that warmed at the feeling.”
V. E. Schwab
A Gathering of Shadows
“Why did everyone have to ruin the quiet by asking questions? The truth was a disastrous thing.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“Word of mouth was its own kind of magic.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“You are my best friend. In life. In death. And everything in between.”
V. E. Schwab
Tunnel of Bones
“You asked me if I ever wanted to believe in something. I do. I want to believe in this. I want to believe that there’s more.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“You can’t make people love you. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”
V. E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“You can’t be two people. You end up being neither.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“You don’t think about how unnerving silence is until it’s everywhere.”
V. E. Schwab
City of Ghosts
“You don’t understand,” gasped Eli. “No one understands.” “When no one understands, that’s usually a good sign that you’re wrong.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“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
A Darker Shade of Magic
“You know,” he says, “for someone who doesn’t like touching people, you keep finding ways to put your hands on me.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
“You look like Snow White killed the queen and stole the mirror.”
V. E. Schwab
Vengeful
“You look more ready to storm a city than seduce a man.”
V. E. Schwab
A Darker Shade of Magic
“You must make time for that which matters, for that which defines you: your passion, your progress, your pen. Take it up, and write your own story.”
V. E. Schwab
Vicious
“You wanted to feel alive, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re monster or human. Living hurts.”
V. E. Schwab
This Savage Song
“You’re a Keeper. You hunt down the animated records of the dead in your spare time. I’m pretty sure you can handle private school.”
V. E. Schwab
The Unbound
“You’re trying to block out every bit of noise. But people are made of noise, Mac. The world is full of noise. And finding quiet isn’t about pushing everything out. It’s just about pulling yourself in.”
V. E. Schwab
The Archived
Read more Author Quotes like this
