Leigh Bardugo’s bestseller Six of Crows came out eight years ago, and our love for the series has not diminished one bit! The series made us ride an emotional rollercoaster as we followed the six outcasts who would go on to become family. We’ve put together some of the series’ best quotes that showcase the series’s best qualities. Read on to see our choices.
Laughing out Loud
This series has its share of dark moments, but that doesn’t stop the characters from making us laugh with their crazy antics and conversations.
“Kaz leaned back. ‘What’s the easiest way to steal a man’s wallet?’
‘Knife to the throat?’ asked Inej.
‘Gun to the back?’ said Jesper.
‘Poison in his cup?’ suggested Nina.
‘You’re all horrible,’ said Matthias.”
Pekka Rollins is one of many foes the Crows face, and Jesper makes a joke about Wylan’s flute playing and how he will use it to annoy Kaz when they’re dead. Kaz quips back, but Matthias is quick to shut it down.
“’Fine. But if Pekka Rollins kills us all, I’m going to get Wylan’s ghost to teach my ghost how to play the flute just so that I can annoy the hell out of your ghost.’
Brekker’s lips quirked. ‘I’ll just hire Matthias’ ghost to kick your ghost’s ass.’
‘My ghost won’t associate with your ghost,’ Matthias said primly, and then wondered if the sea air was rotting his brain.’
Matthias was raised with a strict upbringing and traditional gender roles, so Nina’s brazen nature is a bit confronting for him. Man, does she get him good.
“’It’s not natural for women to fight.’
‘It’s not natural for someone to be as stupid as he is tall, and yet there you stand.’”
Ketterdam is a city filled with crime, so for them, “the mark” means their target. Wylan being the oblivious cinnamon roll he is, doesn’t quite catch on to the lingo.
“’Always hit where the mark isn’t looking’ ‘Who’s Mark?’ asked Wylan.”
The characters of this book see kruge (money) as their ticket to freedom, so there’s no shortage of jokes about cash and what they intend to do with it.
“’When we get our money, you can burn kruge to keep you warm.’
‘I’m going to pay someone to burn my kruge for me.’
‘Why don’t you pay someone else to pay someone to burn your kruge for you? That’s what the big players do.’”
Swoonworthy
The Crows have proven that even if you’re fighting for your life, there’s still time for romance! The three couples of the series have no shortage of quotes that make us melt.
“He needed to tell her…what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn’t pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he’d begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat.”
“I have been made to protect you. Only in death will I be kept from this oath.”
“She’d laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
“’I can hear the change in Kaz’s breathing when he looks at you.’
‘You… you can?’
‘It catches every time like he’s never seen you before.’”
Wylan gets a total makeover from a powered-up Nina to fool his father, and Jesper is missing Wylan’s true face more than he’d like to admit.
“’Nina might not be able to put you back, you know. Not without another dose of parem. You could be stuck like this.’
‘Why does it matter?’
‘I don’t know!’ Jesper said angrily. ‘Maybe I liked your stupid face.’”
Thought-Provoking
The characters have all walked a difficult road leading up to the events of the novel, so it’s no surprise they have some powerful words to share.
“Inej had once offered to teach him how to fall. ‘The trick is not getting knocked down,’ he’d told her with a laugh. ‘No, Kaz,’ she’d said, ‘the trick is in getting back up.’”
“The heart is an arrow. It demands aim to land true.”
Kaz is emotionally unavailable, to say the least, and he uses his persona as an armor to avoid being hurt. Inej makes it clear to him that she will have him, but not while he hides behind his armor.
“I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all.”
“There was no part of him that was not broken, that had not healed wrong, and there was no part of him that was not stronger for having been broken.”
“She wouldn’t wish love on anyone. It was the guest you welcomed and then couldn’t be rid of.”
For more Six of Crows content, click here and here.