Top 500 Laini Taylor Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

353. “As to having a preference, that was new too. You take what you’re given and you’re grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one’s own likes and dislikes could matter to other people.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Now more than ever she struck him like a fairy in a tale – a haunted one with shadowed eyes and a sting like a scorpion.”

— Laini Taylor

358. “Names have power, and he was, from infancy, associated with gold.”

— Laini Taylor

359. “A kiss must end for another to begin, and it did, and did again.”

— Laini Taylor

360. “Who had ever expended so much passion on a dream, only to stand helpless as it was granted to others? Others, moreover, who had expended no passion on it at all.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

364. “You almost hold up your piece of paper and say, ‘The girl I like just gave me a treasure map to herself.’ But you don’t. You just don’t.”

— Laini Taylor

365. “I admit, I prefer an open mind to a closed one.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

367. “Weep slept. Dreamers dreamed. A grand moon drifted, and, and the wings of the citadel cut the sky in two: light above, dark below.”

— Laini Taylor

368. “One beat followed the sound, a single beat of stillness, and then chaos leapt in.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

370. “Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.”

— Laini Taylor

371. “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

372. “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

373. “He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.”

— Laini Taylor

374. “It hadn’t occurred in the physical realm, that much was true. His hand had not touched her hand. But... his mind had touched her mind, and that seemed to him a deeper reality and even greater intimacy.”

— Laini Taylor

375. “A wave of weariness took him. How could life be so unrelentingly ugly?”

— Laini Taylor

376. “She tasted of fairytales.”

— Laini Taylor

377. “We only get to be one person; we don’t even get to choose that person. By the time we get ahold of ourselves, we are pieces already in play.”

— Laini Taylor

378. “The gods had been dead for fifteen years, after all, but their hate had lingered, and ruled in their stead.”

— Laini Taylor

379. “It was, in fact, quite difficult to lie to a hawk.”

— Laini Taylor

380. “She wore her ferocity like armor, and it was purely asexual armor. Liraz was untouchable and untouched.”

— Laini Taylor

381. “Plus, it would be fun. Don’t you think? I’ve always wanted to tase someone. Zap!” Zuzana mimicked convulsions.”

— Laini Taylor

382. “Life doesnt need magic to be magical.”

— Laini Taylor

383. “I am a link in a chain.”

— Laini Taylor

384. “Her body may have been wrought with diamonds, but her soul within will be a soft mollusk thing, wet and shrinking... and easily pushed aside.”

— Laini Taylor

385. “It was Kizzy’s first kiss and maybe it was her last and it was delicious.”

— Laini Taylor

386. “It’s not easy having a paradox at the core of one’s own being.”

— Laini Taylor

387. “We will fight for our world to the last echo of our souls.”

— Laini Taylor

388. “We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.”

— Laini Taylor

389. “She’d thought that she would do anything for them, but it had never occurred to her that “anything” might mean letting them go.”

— Laini Taylor

390. “Unlike those many dead because of him, he had life, and life wasn’t a default state – I am not dead, hence I must be alive – but a medium. For action, for effort. As long as he had life, who deserved it so little, he would use it, wield it, and do whatever he could in its name, even if it was not, was never, enough.”

— Laini Taylor

391. “There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms. Sathaz had finally learned that if he climbed into the pool and kept very still, the moon would come to him and let him be near her. Only near, never touching. He couldn’t touch her without shattering her, and so – as Lazlo had told Sarai – he had made peace with the impossible. He took what he could get.”

— Laini Taylor

392. “The worst moment of one’s life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.”

— Laini Taylor

393. “I feel liquefied, like a cucumber forgotten in the crisper drawer, and I want to hold myself at arm’s length and carry me to the trash. Who is this sack of slush masquerading as me? It’s intolerable.”

— Laini Taylor

394. “You really think joy is easier to come by than pain? What have you had more of?”

— Laini Taylor

395. “Why should we have to disappear just because men are animals?”

— Laini Taylor

396. “Many fists against fewer, perhaps, but the fewer have magic.”

— Laini Taylor

397. “I’m a librarian,” he said.”

— Laini Taylor

398. “With his fort of books the hobgoblin had come to a smooching scene and shouted for them to pipe down.”

— Laini Taylor

399. “On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.”

— Laini Taylor

400. “Karou wasn’t a prize to win; that wasn’t why he was here. She was a woman and would choose her own life. He was here to do what he could, whatever he could, that she might have a life to choose, one day. Whoever and whatever that included was her own affair.”

— Laini Taylor