Holly Black Quotes

The only way to end grief was to go through it.

~ Holly Black

Ben was taking her through the storm of grief. He was singing her through the rage and despair. He was singing her through the terrible loneliness, because there was no way to shut off grief, no way to cast it aside or fight against it. The only way to end grief was to go through it.As she realized that, his song began to change. It grew softer, sweeter, like the morning after a long cry, when your head still hurt but your heart was no longer broken.

~ Holly Black

I survive at the edge of friends circles.

~ Holly Black

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.

~ Holly Black

I'm going to take off your gag. And if you try to bite me or grab me or anything, I'll hit you with this thing as hard as I can as many times as I can. Understood?

~ Holly Black

That was seven years ago. The doctors told her father the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.

~ Holly Black

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.

~ Holly Black

His wax-white skin was cool to the touch when she brushed his neck to find the knot of cloth. She'd never been this close to a vampire,never realized what it would be like to be so near to someone who didn't breathe, who could be as still as any statue. His chest neither rose not fell. Her hands shook.

~ Holly Black

Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other's arms.

~ Holly Black

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.

~ Holly Black

Can't get away from your own self.

~ Holly Black

We labor under so many illusions about ourselves until we're stripped bare. Being infected, being a vampire, it's always you. Maybe it's more you than ever before. You, distilled. You, boiled down like a sauce. But it's you as you always were, deep down inside.

~ Holly Black

He had read lots of stories where heroes succeeded in spite of long odds, where they accomplished a task that everyone else had failed at. He wondered for the first time about all the people who'd gone before those heroes, about whether they'd been at each other's throats, before everything had gone wrong. He wondered if there was a point where they realized they weren't going to make it, weren't going to beat those long odds--that in the legend that would follow, they were going to be the nameless people that failed.

~ Holly Black

She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.

~ Holly Black

Kiss my ass Rath Roiben Rye

~ Holly Black

The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.

~ Holly Black

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

~ Holly Black

Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.

~ Holly Black

Some things exist whether you believe in them or not

~ Holly Black

Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying

~ Holly Black

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.

~ Holly Black

Tana would sit near the door to the basement with fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana's little bed. 'Make her stop' Pearl said, but Tana couldn't.

~ Holly Black

There’s a tipping point with lies, a point where you’ve said something so many times that it feels truer than the truth.

~ Holly Black

I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.

~ Holly Black

Once someone's hurt you, it's harder to relax around them, harder to think of them as safe to love. But it doesn't stop you from wanting them. Sometimes I actually think it makes the wanting worse.

~ Holly Black

Don't know. Don't care. I'm hopping on a bus and going until I can't go any farther. Until I find a place that feels like home.'He's quiet for a long time. 'How will you know what home feels like?'It hangs in the air between us, as frozen as our breaths. I don't have an answer.

~ Holly Black

Who cares about a test? There will be a million more quizzed in your life.

~ Holly Black

When we turn,is there something shoved inside of us or is it more that something inside of us has been released?

~ Holly Black

My view of writing Coldest Girl in Coldtown was to take every single thing that I loved from every vampire book I had ever read and dump it into one book--everything I like--trying to evoke some of the decadence… Vampires are a high-class monster: They want to dress up. They want to drink a lot of absinthe, or force their victims to drink a lot of absinthe. They have big parties and have elegant rituals. I think that's a thing we associate with vampires--they are the royalty of our monsters. We expect them to be rich, we expect them to be well-dressed. I wanted to have some of that be true because I like it, and have some of it not be true because it's kind of weird.I wanted to put in the idea of infection, which I was really interested in and which was a big feature of the vampire books I read growing up. And, the fear and desire for infection--the way in which our urge towards loving vampires is nihilistic. Our fear of them is our survival instincts kicking in.

~ Holly Black

I really love folklore. I had read a lot of faerie folklore that informed the books I wrote. I also really love vampire folklore; my eighth grade research paper was on [it]. [With this project,] it was really helpful to think about the way you can use language. When you're writing about faeries, you can't call anyone fey; there are certain words that become forbidden because they're actualized in what faeries do. When you write about vampires, you could think the same way about things like the word red or hunger--it's interesting to think of the ways that the words have double meanings, or different meanings that shifted.

~ Holly Black

When Tana was six, vampires were Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester lining.

~ Holly Black

She swallowed his blood, a dark vintage from some forgotten cellar. She felt like Persephone in Hades, pomegranate seeds bursting against her teeth, juice rolling on her tongue, and the more she had, the more she hungered.

~ Holly Black

There was a young lady of NigerWho smiled as she rode on a tiger,They returned from a rideWith the Lady insideAnd the smile on the face of the tiger.

~ Holly Black

Occasionally, there are battles in the sky. One likes to imagine the angels are always triumphant. One does not like to think of the ancient and terrible scales balancing the infernal and divine as wobbling back and forth. Tilting freely, to and fro. One does not like to think that sometimes it is the angel that falls.

~ Holly Black

I wonder about death, I who may never know it. It looks much like ecstacy, the way they open their mouths as they drown, the way their fingers dig into your skin. Their eyes are wide and startled and they trash in your hands as though with an excess of passion.

~ Holly Black

You can always count on your family to love you. And to betray you. And then to feel guilty about it.

~ Holly Black

I wonder if he really could rationalize what I did to him, really treat betrayal like the slight transgression of a recalcitrant business partner. I wonder if I hurt him. If he can rationalize what I did to him, it’s easy to imagine how he rationalized what he did to me.

~ Holly Black

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

~ Holly Black

Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.

~ Holly Black

Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

~ Holly Black