Top 500 Laini Taylor Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “He reached for her hand and caught it – lightly – and held it. It was small, smooth, and very real. Up in the citadel, Sarai gasped. She felt the warmth of his skin on hers. A blaze of connection – or collision, as though they had long been wandering in the same labyrinth and had finally rounded the corner that would bring them face-to-face. It was a feeling of being lost and alone and then suddenly neither.”

— Laini Taylor

302. “And the space where his legend was gathering up words grew larger. Because this story was not over yet.”

— Laini Taylor

303. “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

304. “To a new generation of butterflies, hopefully less stupid than last. Maybe they were burgeoning even now in fat little cocoons. Or maybe not.”

— Laini Taylor

305. “She may have been the one whose name meant music, but his sounded like it. Saying it made her want to sing it, to lean out a window and call him home. To whisper it in the dark.”

— Laini Taylor

306. “It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented.”

— Laini Taylor

307. “She hadn’t known she was crushed until she wasn’t, and she didn’t know she was fragmented until she became whole.”

— Laini Taylor

308. “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

309. “He blushed, abashed. “I’m sorry.” “I’m going to impose a fine on apologies,” she said. “I didn’t like to mention it last night, but today is your new beginning. Ten silver every time you say you’re sorry.” Lazlo laughed, and had to bite his tongue before apologizing for apologizing. “It was trained into me,” he said. “I’m helpless.”

— Laini Taylor

310. “No, I have to lure him out, like a will-o’-the-wisp, tease him deeper and deeper into the forest until he is lost and doomed. Without the forest or the doom – just the luring. Like a Venus flytrap that says I am a delicious flower come taste me and then snap! Devour. Without the devouring.”

— Laini Taylor

311. “Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn’t she be that cat?”

— Laini Taylor

312. “Skathis might have been an artist, but he’d been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.”

— Laini Taylor

313. “I’ve never liked to call it that,” cut in Thyon – softly, like a confession. “It’s bitter on my tongue. I think of it as the Unseen City instead.”

— Laini Taylor

314. “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

315. “It was like dying, but without the consolation of oblivion.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

317. “There were some piled furs in the corner, but they were gross and old, and Zuzana was pretty sure that a variety of otherworldly vermin were living out rich, multigenerational sagas in them.”

— Laini Taylor

318. “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

319. “I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.”

— Laini Taylor

320. “It’s easy to make people cry. Grief, humiliation, anger – there are countless avenues to tears. It’s easy to make them scream, too. There are so many things to fear.”

— Laini Taylor

321. “Push the chair in too quickly or too slowly, or else sit too soon or too heavily, and misadventure ensues, perhaps even an unintended baptism of the hindquarters.”

— Laini Taylor

322. “It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over.”

— Laini Taylor

323. “Music. Close your eyes and it’s a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.”

— Laini Taylor

324. “I’m lucky I’m even alive,” she announced. “When I was little, I sucked on duck eyeballs.”

— Laini Taylor

325. “She tried to pray, but she had only ever prayed at night, and it seemed to her that the moons made poor protectors when angels chose to hunt by day.”

— Laini Taylor

326. “Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did the not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and her, mingled together, could... countervail each other?”

— Laini Taylor

327. “The ones who know can’t tell us, and the ones who tell us don’t know.”

— Laini Taylor

328. “His shadow splayed out huge before him, and his mind gleamed with ancient wars and winged beings, a mountain of melted demon bones and the city on the far side of it – a city that had vanished in the mists of time.”

— Laini Taylor

329. “It wasn’t simply a question of parlors and tea trays – though there was that, too. If she were coming in reality he would be limited by reality. But dreams were a different matter. He was Strange the Dreamer. This was his realm, and there were no limits here.”

— Laini Taylor

330. “He had, in his hearts, declared war on the dark child, but Lazlo was no warrior, and his hearts had no talent for hate.”

— Laini Taylor

331. “Lazlo couldn’t have belonged at the library more truly if he were a book himself.”

— Laini Taylor

332. “Once upon a time, chimaera descended by the thousands into a cathedral beneath the earth. And never left.”

— Laini Taylor

333. “It’s easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.”

— Laini Taylor

334. “There were two mysteries, actually: one old, one new. The old one opened his mind, but it was the new one that climbed inside, turned several circle, and settled in with a grunt – like a satisfied dragon in a new cozy lair. And there it would remain – the mystery, in his mind – exhaling enigma for years to come.”

— Laini Taylor

335. “Staring at herself in the mirror, she found that she’d lost the ability to see herself through her own eyes. She was only what humans would see. Not a girl or a woman or someone in between. They wouldn’t see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity.”

— Laini Taylor

336. “I’ve always been a reader and a writer.”

— Laini Taylor

337. “She tasted of fairytales.”

— Laini Taylor

338. “The truth, she found, felt smooth, like a skipping stone in the palm of your hand.”

— Laini Taylor

339. “And when her hearts resumed beating, she imagined she could feel a spill of light into the veins that carried her spirit.”

— Laini Taylor

340. “It’s all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.”

— Laini Taylor

341. “Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.”

— Laini Taylor

342. “And what’s the point of being young if you can’t ignore all advice?” Master.”

— Laini Taylor

343. “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

344. “Life won’t just happen to you, boy,” he said. “You have to happen to it. Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.”

— Laini Taylor

345. “Seventh bearer of the cursed name Akiva.” Here he paused, speculative. “No Misbegotten ever bore that name to manhood before you. Did you know that? Old Byon the steward, he gave it out of spite. Wanted your mother to beg him not to. Any other woman in the harem would have, but not Festival. ‘Scribble whatever you like on your list, old man,’ she told him. ‘My son will not be tangled in your feeble fates.’”

— Laini Taylor

346. “She’d poured so much of herself into keeping it buried, sometimes it felt like any energy she might have had for joy or love or light went there instead. You only had so much to give.”

— Laini Taylor

347. “He’d felt this before and never wanted to feel it again. It could only diminish the memory of Madrigal; it already was. Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played.”

— Laini Taylor

348. “There are maps in me but I am lost, and there are skies in me but they are dead.”

— Laini Taylor

349. “Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.”

— Laini Taylor

350. “You mean he came to your school? The scandalous rodent-loaf!”

— Laini Taylor