Top 500 Laini Taylor Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “He dreamed of deserts and great empty cities and imagined he could feel the minutes and hours of his life running through him, as though he were nothing but an hourglass of flesh and bone.”

— Laini Taylor

252. “Her lips were still moving, whispering the same words over and over. “They were all I could carry. They were all I could carry.”

— Laini Taylor

253. “There was some new quiet in her, but it didn’t shrink or wilt her. Rather, it seemed to enlarge her. She was no mere weapon as she was trained to be, but a woman in full command of her power, unbowed and unbroken, and that was a dangerous thing.”

— Laini Taylor

254. “Without his books, Lazlo felt as though a vital link to his dream had been cut.”

— Laini Taylor

255. “And just so you know, the invaders are always the bad guys. Always.”

— Laini Taylor

256. “He had melted away, and she felt his absence like a space cut from the air.”

— Laini Taylor

257. “It wasn’t even an alternate version of his life. He hadn’t gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it’s enough to start doing things differently now.”

— Laini Taylor

258. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

263. “Wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, ‘My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”

— Laini Taylor

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

267. “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

268. “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

269. “When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.”

— Laini Taylor

270. “Never before had time seemed so like currency, each moment a coin that could be well- or ill-spent, or even, if one wasn’t careful, wasted and lost.”

— Laini Taylor

271. “Karou was, simply, lovely. Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. Beyond merely pretty, her face was vibrantly alive, her gaze always sparking and luminous, and she had a birdlike way of cocking her head, her lips pressed together while her dark eyes danced, that hinted at secrets and mysteries.”

— Laini Taylor

272. “To his dismay, it sounded as out of place in this somber laboratory as the book looked out of place, and he found himself rushing to keep ahead of his growing mortification, which only made it sound wilder and more foolish the faster he went. “You.”

— Laini Taylor

273. “Thank you to the world for being a wild and inspiring place, full of odd creatures, strange people, and mysterious cities. I hope by and by to know you better.”

— Laini Taylor

274. “Head held high, she stepped toward the block and sank to her knees, and it was then that Akiva started to scream. His voice soared over the pandemonium – a scream to scour the souls of all gathered, a sound to drive ghosts from their nests.”

— Laini Taylor

275. “There, there,” consoled Lazlo. “You’re a very fierce warrior. Don’t cry. You’re terrifying.”

— Laini Taylor

276. “Our priestesses have always taught that divinity, by virtue of its great power, must encompass both beauty and terror.”

— Laini Taylor

277. “The night felt very long, but it ended as all nights do.”

— Laini Taylor

278. “There is intimacy in pain. Anyone who has comforted a sufferer knows it – the helpless tenderness, the embrace and murmur and slow rocking together as two become one against the enemy, pain.”

— Laini Taylor

279. “His hope was like an intake of icy air – it hurt – and just as sharp and sudden was his jealousy. In an instant he was hot and cold with it, his hands clenching into fists so tight they burned. A flare of adrenaline coursed through him and left him shaking, and it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her, and for the fleeting flash of an instant, he felt relief. Followed by crushing disappointment and self-loathing for what his reaction had been.”

— Laini Taylor

280. “These soldiers had done what they had done, and been done unto in return. This was how it went. In the cycle of slaughter, reprisal begat reprisal, forever.”

— Laini Taylor

281. “Forbid a man something and he craves it like his soul’s salvation.”

— Laini Taylor

282. “And Esme remembered in a rush – the wolfsong, the haunting, lyrical spirals of it in the dawn quiet and the feeling of euphoria that had attended it. Even in recollection the howling uplifted her like the crescendo at the end of a symphony and made her heartbeat quicken.”

— Laini Taylor

283. “Cake for later, cake as a way of life.”

— Laini Taylor

284. “I want to build spires in their minds and dance shadows through like marionettes, chased by whispers and hints of the unspeakable.”

— Laini Taylor

285. “His soul had flown on ahead of his body and left it stranded.”

— Laini Taylor

286. “This was not the frustration one feels at waking from a sweet dream. It was the desolation of having found the place that fits, the one true place, and experiencing the first heady sigh of rightness before being torn away and cast back into random, lonely scatter.”

— Laini Taylor

287. “Karou saw them with her human eyes, this army she had rendered more monstrous than ever nature had, and she knew what the world would see in them if they flew to fight the Dominion: demons, nightmares, evil. The sight of the seraphim would be heralded as a miracle. But chimaera? The apocalypse.”

— Laini Taylor

288. “He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn’t sleep at all.”

— Laini Taylor

289. “For an instant, at least, they seemed one and the same, as though all anguish exists in the same deep well, no matter what loss or misfortune leads us to it. We might be at odds, hate each other, and desired each others destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.”

— Laini Taylor

290. “To take from the universe, you must give.”

— Laini Taylor

291. “Once upon a time, there had been gods. Now there were only children going about in their dead parents’ undergarments.”

— Laini Taylor

292. “After the week she’d had, she wanted to go to the cafe and sink into a couch, gossip and laugh and sketch and drink tea and make up for lost normal.”

— Laini Taylor

293. “And they hooked their fingers around its slender spurs, and pulled.”

— Laini Taylor

294. “Then there were things – epic, terrible things – that he didn’t tell her but skirted around, like caressing the edges of a wound, hesitant, testing for pain.”

— Laini Taylor

295. “When he started to renew his protest, she held up a hand. “What are you more afraid of: them or me with low blood sugar?”

— Laini Taylor

296. “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

297. “Her voice would die before she ran out of rage. She could scream a hole in her throat and come unraveled, fall to pieces like moth-chewed silk, and still, from the leftover shreds of her, the little pile of tatters, would pour forth this unending scream.”

— Laini Taylor

298. “It was the first time either of them had ever held another’s hand, and for them alone, the immensity of what unfolded that night was overshadowed by the perfect wonderment of fingers intertwined – as though this was what hands had always been for, and not for holding weapons at all.”

— Laini Taylor

299. “Love makes a person do strange things.”

— Laini Taylor

300. “On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.”

— Laini Taylor