Top 500 Laini Taylor Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “One can’t be irredeemable who shows reverence for books.”

— Laini Taylor

202. “Strange the dreamer – library stowaway and scholar of fairy tales – had never been thirstier, or more full of wonder.”

— Laini Taylor

203. “A thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here.”

— Laini Taylor

204. “The tattered lace of darkness still hung over the city, as if night were a grim bride trudging to the horizon, trailing her shadowy train.”

— Laini Taylor

205. “He’d had to watch Madrigal die, and he hadn’t understood the fervor – the ecstasy – of the crowd. He hadn’t understood why the only one who mourned her was the enemy, driven to his knees and bloody from torture.”

— Laini Taylor

206. “Have you drowned stars like they were babies in a bath? I ended the First Age, and I’ll end the second, too.”

— Laini Taylor

207. “She was young and lovely and surprised and dead. She was also blue. Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring – not summer – sky.”

— Laini Taylor

208. “Love affair. Doesn’t that sound so middle-aged? And also ill-fated. Like ill-fated is an understood prefix to love affair. Well, ill-fated is fine, as long as it’s a meaty and fraught ill-fated love affair, not a pale and insipid one.”

— Laini Taylor

209. “It’s the mind. It’s the most complex and astonishing thing there is, that there’s a world inside each of us that no one else can ever know or see or visit.”

— Laini Taylor

210. “Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.”

— Laini Taylor

211. “Love that sets forth the soul like springtime and ripens it like summer. Love as rarely exists in reality, as if a master alchemist has taken it and distilled out all the impurities, every petty disenchantment, every unworthy thought, into a perfect elixir, sweet and deep and all-consuming.”

— Laini Taylor

212. “El Amor es un Elemento. – Akiva.”

— Laini Taylor

213. “Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one’s soul so entangled in it that you can’t let it go, even if you try. If you feel it – if you really feel it – then you speak it like it’s a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there’s blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can’t let go.”

— Laini Taylor

214. “For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions.”

— Laini Taylor

215. “He didn’t think like other people. He didn’t dismiss magic out of hand, and he didn’t believe that fairy tales were just for children. He knew magic was real, because he’d felt it.”

— Laini Taylor

216. “You think good people can’t hate?” she asked. “You think good people don’t kill?”

— Laini Taylor

217. “It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell.”

— Laini Taylor

218. “Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.”

— Laini Taylor

219. “Everyone else had managed to pick up the tatters and mend them into wearable lives. Why couldn’t he?”

— Laini Taylor

220. “The iguana was not invited.”

— Laini Taylor

221. “He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.”

— Laini Taylor

222. “The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion – to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering – and cause it – and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.”

— Laini Taylor

223. “You don’t know yet what you’re capable of, but I’m willing to bet it’s extraordinary.”

— Laini Taylor

224. “How could you tell if your instincts were just hope in disguise, and if your hope was really desperation parading as possibility?”

— Laini Taylor

225. “Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.”

— Laini Taylor

226. “If it’s not chocolate, it’s not breakfast.”

— Laini Taylor

227. “Those seraphim who escaped into the neighbor world Eretz managed to hold the portal closed, and they held it to this day, pouring their strength into shoring up their sky to keep the darkness at bay. A bold young queen in that distant world was even now training a legion of angels and chimaera to battle the darkness and hopefully destroy it. But that’s another story.”

— Laini Taylor

228. “Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn’t like being locked away.”

— Laini Taylor

229. “The goddess of assassins has tasted my blood, he thought, and he wondered if she liked it, and wanted more.”

— Laini Taylor

230. “The eye’s perception of texture is pale compared to the lips’, and I didn’t know what velvety was until I knew it with my lips. Oh, kissing. Oh, violin boy.”

— Laini Taylor

231. “He actually listened, rather than pretending to listen while waiting a suitable interval before it was his time to talk again...”

— Laini Taylor

232. “Here is a great man, and also a good one, though few men are ever both.”

— Laini Taylor

233. “The goddess of dreams, she thought, if there were such a person, would wear gossamer and moonlight. No sooner did she think it than she was it. Her skin let off a subtle glow. Her dress floated like evaporating mist, and a corona of stars and fireflies perched on her red-brown hair.”

— Laini Taylor

234. “With the infinite patience of one who has learned to live broken, he awaited her return.”

— Laini Taylor

235. “We might be at odds, hate each other, and desire each other’s destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.”

— Laini Taylor

236. “It was only an illusion, but a perfect illusion.”

— Laini Taylor

237. “What does true even mean when it comes to a face? Only souls are true, and when you spill them to the air they melt away...”

— Laini Taylor

238. “No era tiempo para enamorarse.”

— Laini Taylor

239. “What she had shared with Akiva could not be touched by shame. Madrigal lifted her voice to say, “We dreamed together of the world remade.”

— Laini Taylor

240. “The world was carnage. You either suffered it or inflicted it.”

— Laini Taylor

241. “He wasn’t an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.”

— Laini Taylor

242. “It’s the fuel for everything our people have done to each other since the beginning. That’s what makes peace seem impossible. How can you blame someone for wanting to kill the killer of their loved ones? How can you fault people for what they do in grief?”

— Laini Taylor

243. “It was one of those dreams that invade the space between seconds, proving sleep has its own physics- where time shrinks and swells, lifetimes unspool in a blink, and cities burn to ash in a mere flutter of lashes.”

— Laini Taylor

244. “He hoped at least that Lazlo saw how foolish it all was. Sarai wasn’t like that. Lazlo was lucky. Well, Sarai was dead, so not lucky lucky.”

— Laini Taylor

245. “Peace is more than the absence of war.”

— Laini Taylor

246. “His warmth was like a gift given and snatched away, and she stood there with her back to the window, feeling chilled, bereft, and undone. And angry. It was a childish, cartoonish anger- facing Akiva, she had wanted to beat her fists at his chest and then fall against him and feel his arms close around her.”

— Laini Taylor

247. “A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.”

— Laini Taylor

248. “Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you’re trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.”

— Laini Taylor

249. “A person could be driven mad by hate. It was a force as destructive as any Mesarthim gift, and harder to end than a god. The gods had been dead for fifteen years, after all, but their hate had lingered, and ruled in their stead.”

— Laini Taylor

250. “To have been granted so tiny a taste of the nectar of her mouth, and so brief a brush with the velvet of her lips was unspeakable cruelty. He felt set on fire.”

— Laini Taylor