Top 500 Laini Taylor Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “The thing is, you throw brains and souls into an animal and stir, you don’t really know what you’re going to get.”

— Laini Taylor

402. “It was as if she had emitted a pulse of radiation that reached him even where he stood, and it bathed him and it burned him.”

— Laini Taylor

403. “You know how some people were absolutely never children, but just came from a catalog fully grown, while other people you don’t even have to squint to imagine them charging down the stairs on Christmas morning in superhero pajamas? Mik’s the latter. It’s not that he’s “boyish,” though I guess he is a little – but only a little – it’s just that there’s something direct and real and electric and pure that hasn’t been lost, the intense, undiluted emotion of childhood. Most people lose it.”

— Laini Taylor

404. “I am a link in a chain.”

— Laini Taylor

405. “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

406. “And... a bed. A bed and a blanket to cover them, a blanket that was theirs together.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

409. “There was always, among them, such a stew of envy and longing. They hated the humans, but they also wanted to be them. They wanted to punish them, and they wanted to be embraced by them. To be accepted, honored, loved, like someone’s child. And since they couldn’t have any of it, it all took the form of spite. Anyone who has ever been excluded can understand what they felt, and no one has ever been quite so excluded as they.”

— Laini Taylor

410. “So Sarai gave in to the scream that night, and the dark things within her took wing. They came boiling out between her lips, and they weren’t demons after all, but moths.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

413. “I’m a librarian,” he said.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

415. “So what,’ said Zuzana. ‘They had to be pretty stupid butterflies to fall for him anyway. You’ll grow new ones with more sense. New wise butterflies.”

— Laini Taylor

416. “She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.”

— Laini Taylor

417. “Well,” Loraz said, her voice as dry as the rest of her was not. “At least you still have clothes on.”

— Laini Taylor

418. “In the darkness behind their shut lids they all saw the same thing: no color at all, only loss like a hole torn in the world.”

— Laini Taylor

419. “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

420. “I might try that one thing, you know, that thing people do when their eyes get all wet and stupid – what’s it called? Crying? Or NOT. I might PUNCH you instead and trust that you won’t punch me back because of my endearing smallness. It would be like punching a child.”

— Laini Taylor

421. “In all that was to happen, there would be that feeling of inevitability and rightness, and the sense that the universe was conspiring in it. It would be easy.”

— Laini Taylor

422. “Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.”

— Laini Taylor

423. “He has gotten very tired of everyone thinking the worst of him. He has decided to actively encourage them to do so. It is his perverse notion of amusement, you see.”

— Laini Taylor

424. “In the thick of play, his daydreams were so vivid that a glimpse of reality would have shocked him.”

— Laini Taylor

425. “And if redemption was self-serving, coming as it did ribbon-tied to what he wanted most in life? For once, Akiva’s shame wouldn’t rise to the bait. He wanted what he’d always wanted, and he’d better just say it, his own worries and fears be damned.”

— Laini Taylor

426. “What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream.”

— Laini Taylor

427. “I think they both have to be lucky. It’s like, luck friction. One’s flint and one’s steel, striking together to make fire.”

— Laini Taylor

428. “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

429. “All the bogeymen together, sitting down to tea.”

— Laini Taylor

430. “Like a star in the cupped hands of night.”

— Laini Taylor

431. “He’d sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.”

— Laini Taylor

432. “There was a sensations in his hearts, though, as a stirring of embers. There was fire in him. It wasn’t smothered, only banked, but it would burn like the wings of the seraphim before this was over.”

— Laini Taylor

433. “How people love to see a dream shatter, thought Nova from far away. To see the dreamer hobbled and lamed, foundering in the shards of their broken hopes. This is what you get for believing that you could have more. You’re no better than us. You’re nothing special.”

— Laini Taylor

434. “Liraz was special. Specially antisocial. Spectacularly, even.”

— Laini Taylor

435. “There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.”

— Laini Taylor

436. “Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters? I’ve seen things, angel. There are guerrilla armies that make little boys kill thier own families. Such acts rip out the soul and make space for beasts to grow inside. Armies need beasts, don’t they? Pet beasts, to do their terrible work! And the worst part is, it’s almost impossible to retrieve a soul that has been ripped away. Almost.” He gave Akiva a keen look.“But it can be done, if ever... if ever you decide to go looking for yours.”

— Laini Taylor

437. “They marked his first consideration that there might be other ways of living than the one he knew. Better, sweeter ways.”

— Laini Taylor

438. “No, tiny violent one.”

— Laini Taylor

439. “Around Mik, my powers desert me. I lose basic motor function, like my brain focuses all neural activity on my lips and shifts into kiss preparedness mode way too early, to the detriment of things like speech, and walking.”

— Laini Taylor

440. “So they layered cynicism atop their longing, and it was something like laying laughter over the darkness – self-preservation of an uglier stripe.”

— Laini Taylor

441. “He moved through his mind with the assuredness of an explorer and the grace of a poet.”

— Laini Taylor

442. “You have more to live for than you know.”

— Laini Taylor

443. “It didn’t escape Karou’s notice that he found subtle ways of touching her.”

— Laini Taylor

444. “That was what had finally broken through her blindness. Her father had saved his people and destroyed himself. As strong as he looked, inside he was a ruin, or perhaps a funeral pyre, like the Cusp- only instead of melted bones of ijji, he was made up of the skeletons of babies and children, including, as he had always believed, his own child: her. This was his remorse.”

— Laini Taylor

445. “Karou loved Zuzana for her willingness to play out such silliness on a long kite string.”

— Laini Taylor

446. “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

447. “Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played.”

— Laini Taylor

448. “When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them like red silk. A poetic fruit-seller had told them once that they looked like dryads, and they did still, only now they looked like dryads who had tired of snagging their hair on brambles and sliced it all off on the edge of a knife.”

— Laini Taylor

449. “Lazlo. You have to wake up now, my love. And he did.”

— Laini Taylor

450. “It was enough to marvel at the end of a cycle of reprisals. How seldom it happened, in a long-standing war of hatred, that one side said, “Enough, I deserved that. Let it end here.”

— Laini Taylor