Top 283 Quotes & Sayings by Holly Black - Page 3

I thought of how proud he was when he took the marks- cutting the skin of his throat in a long slash and then packing it with ashes until keloid scars rose up. He called it his second smile.

I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they’ll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there’s nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars.

A second book that makes you rethink the first book is the Holy Grail of a series.

I thought you were her knight, but you have become only her woodsman--taking little girls into the forest to cut out their hearts.

You sure you want to cross me?" In that moment she's her father's daughter.

Yesterday when we went over the plan again and again, I never thought about Grandad showing up. Because I'm an idiot, basically--an idiot with poor planning skills. Of course he's here. Where else would he be? Seriously, what else could go wrong?

Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.

One night you will ask me for something I cannot give.

At the end of a criminal’s life, it’s always the small mistake, the coincidence, the lark. The time we got too comfortable, the time we slipped up, the time someone aimed a little to the left. I’ve heard Grandad’s war stories a thousand times. How they finally got Mo. How Mandy almost got away. How Charlie fell. Birth to grave, we know it’ll be us one day. Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

There’s something about her—Cassel, I have met many evil men and women in my life. I have made deals with them, drank with them. I have done things that I myself have difficulty reconciling—terrible things. But I have never known anyone like your mother. She is a person without limits—or if she has any, she hasn’t found them yet. She never needs to reconcile anything.

I remember everyone telling me I had to think positive when I was writing my first book. If I believed I could do it, then I could! If I pictured myself published, then it was going to happen! Which sounded great, except...could I do it? If I didn't think I could, was I doomed to fail? What if I was almost totally sure I would fail? I am here to tell you-what matters is sticking with it.

It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.

The problem with cell phones is that you can’t slam them down into a cradle when you hang up. Your only option is to throw them, and if you do, they just skitter across the floor and crack their case. It’s not satisfying at all. I close my eyes and bend down to pick up the pieces.

He looks like the good boy he's never been.

You have to write a lot. And you have to rewrite what you wrote a lot more.

You really dug your own grave,” he mutters. “And I’m going to bury you in it.” “Say that louder,” I tell him, under my breath. “I dare you.

I want you and I hate wanting things and I especially hate admitting I want them.

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.

You are the best kind of killer, Cassel Sharpe, the kind that never has blood on his hands. The kind that never has to sicken at the sight of what he's done, or come to like it too much.

After that, she wasn't sure what the game was or if she'd imagined it. All she knew was that she had lost.

I know how to be the witness to her grief. I don't know how to be this kind of villain.

It makes you a different person, to not have a past. It eats away at who you are, until what’s left is all construct, all artifice.

Every plan is a house of cards.

You want me to say something? Okay. Sometimes I think I am what you made me. And sometimes I don’t know who I am at all. And either way I’m not happy.

You got a lot of ladies to get through. You’re still young. First love’s the sweetest, but it doesn’t last.” “Not ever?” I ask. Grandad looks at me with a seriousness he reserves for moments when he wants me to really pay attention. “When we fall that first time, we’re not really in love with the girl. We’re in love with being in love. We’ve got no idea what she’s really about—or what she’s capable of. We’re in love with our idea of her and of who we become around her. We’re idiots.

A girl like that, Grandad said, perfumes herself with ozone and metal filings.

We all wind up drawn to what we're afraid of, drawn to try to find a way to make ourselves safe from a thing by crawling inside of it, by loving it, by becoming it.

Oh- and grab the plastic bag over by my suitcase." I slug down the last of the coffee and get up. The bag contains panty hose. I put them on her desk. "They're for you." "You want me to look homeless, desperate, but also kind of fabulous?

Holly: Seriously, you don't like unicorns? What kind person doesn't like unicorns? Justine: What kind of a person doesn't like zombies? What have zombies ever done to you? Holly: Zombies shamble. I disapprove of shambling. And they have bits that fall off. You never see a unicorn behaving that way. Justine: I shamble. Bits fall off me all the time: hair, skin cells. Are you saying you disapprove of me?

Some promises aren’t worth keeping.

Instead, it just reminded her that sometimes there were no good choices.

This is never going to be over,” I shout. “Someone will always be after me. There’s always consequences. Well, BRING IT. I am done with being afraid, and I am done with you.

It's too early for there to be any coffee. I stare dully at the empty pot in the common room, while Sam picks up a jar of instant grounds. "Don't," I warn him. He scoops up a heaping spoonful and, heedlessly, shovels it into his mouth. It crunches horribly. Then his eyes go wide. "Dry," he croaks. "Tongue...shriveling." I shake my head, picking up the jar. "It's dehydrated. You're supposed to add water. Good thing you're mostly made of water." He tries to say something. Brown powder dusts his shirt. "Also," I tell him, "that's decaf.

I'm not good at having friends. I mean, I can make myself useful to people. I can fit in. I get invited to parties and I can sit at any table I want in the cafeteria. But actually trusting someone when they have nothing to gain from me just doesn't make sense. All friendships are negotiations of power.

A mortal had woven it, a man who, having caught sight of the Seelie queen, had spent the remainder of his short life weaving depictions of her. He had died of starvation, raw, red fingers staining the final tapestry.

He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones as sharp as blades, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His black hair a mad forest of dirty curls.

But if you didn't believe in monsters, then how were you going to be able to keep safe from them?

The most important thing for any con artist is never to think like a mark. Marks think they can get something for nothing. Marks think they can get what they don’t deserve and could never deserve. Marks are stupid and pathetic and sad. Marks think they’re going to go home one night and have the girl they’ve loved since they were a kid suddenly love them back. Marks forget that whenever something’s too good to be true, that’s because it’s a con.

All friendships are negotiations of power.

You set me up," I say. "One big con. You can't blame me because I turned out not to be gullible enough. You can't blame the mark. That's not how it works. Have some respect for the nature of the game.

They think you can't feel anything, because they've forgotten how. You're very, very dangerous, I get that, and you're prone to some very theatrical brooding, but don't let yourself mistake that for some kind of inner corruption. They see themselves in you and are blinded.

Keep going' she told herself, 'Don't look back.' But she looked anyways.

His eyes look too bright, the way the do in people who are in love, people who are enraged, and people who are completely bonkers.

Put your puppet on the throne." said Talathain. "You may make her Queen but she won’t be Queen for long.

Refills are free,” the waitress tells us with a frown, like she’s hoping we’re not the kind of people who ask for endless refills. I am already pretty sure we are exactly those people.

I haven't had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone's dead and my root beer's gone.

There is nothing for her beyond those gates," Gavriel said. "Do you think to bring her along like a talisman to remind you of your humanity? Or do you think sharing your damnation will lighten the burden of it?

She didn't know how much she'd been hoping that he still loved her, until she felt how much it hurt to realize he didn't.

I thought I was getting better at this. I thought I was starting to make peace with being in love with a girl who despises me, but I don't think I'm so okay with it after all. Somewhere along the line I made a dark bargain with the universe without ever really being aware of it--a bargain that if I was allowed to see her, even if we never spoke, then I could live with that. And now a week without her has swallowed up all of my rational thinking. I feel like a junkie, sick for my next fix and not sure when it will come.

Allow me to explain how my whole life has prepared me for this moment. I am used to girls screaming, and your screams – will be sweeter than another’s cries of love.

Jones looks like he wants to slug me, which is only subtly different from his usual way of looking at me like I'm a slug.

She was the epic crush of my childhood. She was the tragedy that made me look inside myself and see my corrupt heart. She was my sin and my salvation, come back from the grave to change me forever. Again. Back then, when she sat on my bed and told me she loved me, I wanted her as much as I have ever wanted anything.

in her dreams, blood tasted like fizzy strawberry soda. If you drank it too fast, you got brain freeze. When she was older, after she'd licked a cut on her finger, the taste of that became the taste in her dreams: copper and tears.

What is it? For what do you scheme? Ethine's death would weigh on you and the stain of her blood would seep into your skin" "Do you know what they wish for when they give you the Unseelie crown?" Roiben's tone was soft, like he was telling a secret. Kaye could barely catch his words. "That you be made of ice. What makes you think it matters what I feel? What makes you think I feel anything at all?

She'd always been a little contemptuous of beauty, as though it was something you had to trade away some other vital thing for.

Death’s favorites don’t die.

Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty.

He runs to the sink to spit it out. I grin. There’s nothing quite as funny as someone else’s misery.

He let out a hiss of pain,then smiled that crooked, sheepish smile he always fell back on when he was caught doing something bad. "Sorry. I-I didn't mean to. I just- I've been lying here for hours, thinking about blood.

It's okay," he informs me. "Your grandfather is teaching me how to play poker." If I know Grandad, that means what he'll really be teaching Sam is how to cheat.