Holly Black Quotes

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.

Those who really love you don't mean to hurt you and if they do, you can't see it in their eyes but it hurts them too.

Baby," she says in a harsh whisper, "in this world, lots of people will try to grind you down. They need you to be small so they can be big. You let them think whatever they want, but you make sure you get yours. You get yours.

I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.

Nothing can happen more beautiful than death - Walt Whitman

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

Yeah, the whole family knows. It's no big deal. One night at dinner I said, 'Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.' It was easier for her to understand that way.

please,Tana,please.' -lots of characters in The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

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

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.

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.

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.

This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.

Magic gives you a lot of choices," Grandad says. "Most of them are bad.

Her screams spiraled up into the night air

No trouble ever got fixed late at night," he said. "Midnight is for regrets.

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.

You and your sister are very dear to each other. To show your regard, you give each other lovely bouquets of lies.

The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.

Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.

I got bored," he says. "Besides, you know what's creepier than walking around your dead brothers' apartment? Sitting alone in a hearse in front of his apartment.

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

She looks honestly upset, but then, I’ve learned that I can’t read her. The problem with a really excellent liar is that you have to just assume they’re always lying.

Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.

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.

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.

She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me.

Can't get away from your own self.

She tastes like every dark thought I've ever had.

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles.

But I didnt do anything wrong.." Which is stupid of course, things dont happen to people because they deserve them.

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.

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.

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

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

No," said Luis, "You can't date the Lord of the Night Court.""Well, I'm not, he dumped me.""You can't get dumped by the lord of the night court.""Oh, yes, you can. You so completely can.

Little mouse," a voice said through the keyhole. "Don't you know the more you wriggle, the greater the cat's delight?

We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be

Adventuring turned out to be boring. Zach thought back to all the fantasy books he'd read where a team of questers traveled overland, and realized a few things. First he'd pictured himself with a loyal steed that would have done most of the walking, so he hadn't anticipated the blister forming on his left heel or the tiny pebble that seemed to have worked its way under his sock, so that even when he stripped off his sneaker he couldn't find it.He hadn't thought about how hot the sun would be either. When he put together his bunch of provisions, he never thought about bringing sunblock. Aragorn never wore sunblock. Taran never wore sunblock. Percy never wore sunblock. But despite all that precedent for going without, he was pretty sure his nose would be lobster-red the next time he looked in the mirror.He was thirsty, too, something that happened a lot in books, but his dry throat bothered him more than it had ever seemed to bother any character.And, unlike in books where random brigands and monsters jumped out just when things got unbearably dull, there was nothing to fight except for the clouds of gnats, several of which Zach was pretty sure he'd accidentally swallowed.

One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.

Behind Tana there was the sounds of splintering wood, as though something very large had hot the door. "No," she said softly, "Oh no. No." "Leave me," said Gavriel. ....."Shut up or I might," she told him.

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

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

I'm afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.

So you'll teach me?" Val asked.Ravus nodded agin. "I will make you as terrible as you desire.""I don't want to be - ," she started, but he held up his hand."I know you're very brave," he said."Or st

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.

If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you."Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.

There's nothing quite as funny as someone else's misery - Cassel Sharpe

If curiosity killed the cat, it was satisfaction that brought it back.

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.

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?

The Anne Rice books are a lot about infection. I read "Interview With the Vampire" a million times when I was in seventh and eighth grade. Also, [writing Gavriel's backstory] definitely came from those books: I sat down and reread them all and thought a lot about… the way in which vampirism is pushing away from humanity in interesting ways, and creating something new from humanity. I imprinted on those books pretty hard.Tanith Lee's "Sabella or the Blood Stone" was a big inspiration. I absolutely loved her books; when I was a kid, I wrote many bad Tanith Lee pastiches. Susie McKee Charnas' "The Vampire Tapestry." Poppy Z. Brite's "Lost Souls." Nancy Collins' "Sunglasses After Dark," which sounds like the most '80s title ever. It's about a vampire named Sonja Blue, and she goes around killing vampires. She's the only vampire who's half-alive. It's a really fun, blood-filled romp. It's very "Blade" before "Blade"--with a lady.

... on the lawn one late summer day, her pale hair tangled because she'd cry if anyone tried to brush it, spinning around and around until she got so dizzy she fell in a pile of bare feet and dandelions and sundress.

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

Some things exist whether you believe in them or not

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.

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.

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.

I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don't even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I'm going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn't involve dying.

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.