Holly Black Quotes

Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses—one black, one white, and the third red.
Holly Black
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.
Holly Black
Even from the beginning, that was the problem. People liked pretty things. People even liked pretty things that wanted to kill and eat them.
Holly Black
Remember that I’m still a monster. I can listen to you scream and cry and beg and I still won’t let you out.
Holly Black
We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be
Holly Black
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.
Holly Black
Dead or not, I have come for his heart and I will have it.
Holly Black
He gave her a smile that wasn’t really a smile at all. “Eh, it wouldn’t be so bad. I wouldn’t have to study for the SATs or get a summer job or figure out my major. I can drink Elderflower wine all day, dance all through the night, and sleep on a bower of roses.”Hazel made a face. “I’m pretty sure there are some colleges where you can do that. I bet there are some colleges where you can major in that.
Holly Black
She tastes like every dark thought I've ever had.
Holly Black
This is the part in the movie where that guy says, "Zombies? What zombies?" just before they eat his brains. I don't want to be that guy.
Holly Black
A stray dog, I might understand," she said. "But this? You are too softhearted."No, Mabry," Ravus said. "I am not." He looked in Val's direction. "I think she wants to die."Maybe you can help her after all," Mabry said. "You're good at helping people die.
Holly Black
Mutually assured destruction.
Holly Black
You can break a thing, but you cannot always guide it afterward into the shape you want.
Holly Black
I'm afraid my voice is going to break. I am afraid she is going to hear how much this hurts.
Holly Black
The hardest thing about being wanted was the hardest thing about wanting—wanting badly enough that it gave you stomachache, wanting in a way that was partly about kissing and partly about swallowing whole, the way a snake gulps down a mouse or the Big Bad Wolf gulps down Red Riding Hood—wanting turned someone you felt like you knew into a stranger. Whether that person was your brother’s best friend or a sleeping prince in a glass prison or a girl who kissed you at a party, the moment you wanted more than just touching your mouth to theirs they became terrifying and you became terrified.
Holly Black
... 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.
Holly Black
She loves the serene brutality of the ocean, loves the electric power she felt with each breath of wet, briny air.
Holly Black
Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.
Holly Black
Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.
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
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
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 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
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
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
No trouble ever got fixed late at night," he said. "Midnight is for regrets.
Holly Black
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
Holly Black
Her screams spiraled up into the night air
Holly Black
When Tana was six, vampires were Muppets, endlessly counting, or cartoon villains in black cloaks with red polyester lining.
Holly Black
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.
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 we turn,is there something shoved inside of us or is it more that something inside of us has been released?
Holly Black
Who cares about a test? There will be a million more quizzed in your life.
Holly Black
You're yourself," Tana said, grinning. "More purely yourself than anyone I know. And if you can't see who that is anymore, then see yourself the way I see you.
Holly Black
If you keep it," Daneca says, "he'll have his claws in you."Everyone has their claws in me. Everyone.
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
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
I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.
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
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
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
Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying
Holly Black
Some things exist whether you believe in them or not
Holly Black
Her tragedy, if she had one, was to be as normal and average as any child ever born.
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
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
Kiss my ass Rath Roiben Rye
Holly Black
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.
Holly Black
She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.
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
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
Can't get away from your own self.
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
Magic gives you a lot of choices," Grandad says. "Most of them are bad.
Holly Black
Better to leave him with the memory of their being a pair of monsters, wrapped in each other's arms.
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