İzy > İzy's Quotes

“Having a heart is terrible, but you need one anyway.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“A heart of stone can still be broken.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“You don’t think monster girls and wicked boys deserve love?”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“And you think it was sunrise I was waiting for and not my queen. Do you not hear her footfalls? She has never quite managed the trick of hiding them as well as one of the Folk. Surely you've heard of her, Jude Duarte, who defeated the redcap Grima Mog, who brought the Court of Teeth to their knees? She's forever getting me out of scrapes. Truly, I don't know what I would do without her.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“Boys change. And so do stories.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“But no one chooses a future. You choose a path without being certain where it leads.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“You didn’t get what you deserved, but you don’t have to live inside that one story forever. No one’s heart has to remain stone.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“He cuts his gaze toward his unpredictable, mortal High Queen, whose wild brown hair is blowing around her face, whose amber eyes are alight when she looks at him.
They are two people who ought to have, by all rights, remained enemies forever.
He can't believe his good fortune, can't trace the path that got him here.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“The next time you want to make a point,' Jude says, 'I beg you not to make it so dramatically.'
His shoulder hurts, and she may be right about the iron poisoning. He certainly feels as though his head is swimming. But he smiles up at the trees, the looping electrical lines, the streaks of clouds.
'So long as you're begging,' he says.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“Villains were wonderful. They got to be cruel and selfish, to preen in front of mirrors and poison apples, and trap girls on mountains of glass. They indulged all their worst impulses, revenged themselves for the least offense, and took every last thing they wanted. And sure, they wound up in barrels studded with nails, or dancing in iron shoes heated by fire, not just dead, but disgraced and screaming. But before they got what was coming to them, they got to be the fairest in all the land.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“Stories can justify anything. It doesn’t matter if the boy with the heart of stone is a hero or a villain; it doesn’t matter if he got what he deserved or if he didn’t. No one can reward him or punish him, save the storyteller.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“Cardan stands, too. 'Everyone finds different lessons in stories, I suppose, but here's one. Having a heart is terrible, but you need one anyway.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“Cardan had trusted Nicasia not to hurt him, which was ridiculous, since he well knew that everyone hurts one another and that the people you loved hurt you the most grievously.”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“It’s you I love,” he says. “I spent much of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn’t have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing. But it is yours.” He walks to the door to the royal chambers, as though to end the conversation. “You probably guessed as much,” he says. “But just in case you didn’t.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Come home and shout at me. Come home and fight with me. Come home and break my heart, if you must.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“By you, I am forever undone.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Mock me all you like. Whatever I imagined then, now it is I who would beg and grovel for a kind word from your lips." His eyes are black with desire. "By you, I am forever undone.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“I missed you," I whisper against his skin and feel dizzy with the intimacy of the admission, feel more naked than when he could see every inch of me. "In the mortal world, when I thought you were my enemy, I still missed you."
"My sweet nemesis, how glad I am that you returned.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“No, I won’t help you. No, I won’t hear you explain why I should. It really is a magical word: no. You say whatever bullshit you want and I just say no.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“I think of his riddle. How do people like us take off our armor?
One piece at a time.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“And yet my heart is buried with you in the strange soil of the mortal world, as it was drowned with you in the cold waters of the undersea.
It was yours before I could ever admit it, and yours it shall ever remain.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Seelie and Unseelie, Wild Folk and Shy Folk, I am glad to have you march under my banner, glad of your loyalty, grateful for your honor.” His gaze goes to me. “To you, I offer honey wine and the hospitality of my table. But to traitors and oath breakers, I offer my queen’s hospitality instead. The hospitality of knives.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“There is no banquet too abundant for a starving man.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Kiss me again,” he says, drunk and foolish. “Kiss me until I am sick of it.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“The three of you have one solution to every problem. Murder. No key fits every lock.” Cardan gives us all a stern look, holding up a long-fingered hand with my stolen ruby ring still on one finger. “Someone tries to betray the High King, murder. Someone gives you a harsh look, murder. Someone disrespects you, murder. Someone ruins your laundry, murder.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“Tell me again what you said at the revel,” he says, climbing over me, his body against mine.

“What?” I can barely think.

“That you hate me,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Tell me that you hate me.”

“I hate you,” I say, the words coming out like a caress. I say it again, over and over. A litany. An enchantment. A ward against what I really feel. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”

He kisses me harder.

“I hate you,” I breathe into his mouth. “I hate you so much that sometimes I can’t think of anything else.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“If you’re the sickness, I suppose you can’t also be the cure.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“The disturbing thing about Cardan is how well he plays the fool to disguise his own cleverness.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“Jesus!" Luke exclaimed.
"Actually, it's just me," said Simon. "Although I've been told the resemblance is startling.”
― Cassandra Clare