Top 500 Laini Taylor Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “So they layered cynicism atop their longing, and it was something like laying laughter over the darkness – self-preservation of an uglier stripe. And thus did they harden themselves, by choosing to meet hate with hate.”

— Laini Taylor

402. “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

403. “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

404. “The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion – to close a door to one’s own self and forget it was ever there.”

— Laini Taylor

405. “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

406. “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

407. “She wanted to climb out of her life as if it were a seashell she could abandon on the shore and walk away from, barefoot.”

— Laini Taylor

408. “He’s a man, but he’s got, like, cartoon princess skin. Don’t ever tell him I said that, even though I mean it in the best possible way. He’s got the manliest cartoon princess skin.”

— Laini Taylor

409. “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

410. “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

411. “I am a link in a chain.”

— Laini Taylor

412. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

418. “I’m a librarian,” he said.”

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

421. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

425. “You’ve got to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs.”

— Laini Taylor

426. “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

427. “There is intimacy in pain.”

— Laini Taylor

428. “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

429. “She looked at him, beautiful Kazimir whose smile used to work on her like a summons, compelling her to his side.”

— Laini Taylor

430. “She gave the words back to him, murmuring, and kept them, too. You could do that: Give them back and keep them. “I love you” is generous that way.”

— Laini Taylor

431. “This was a game that kill could not win – or, if it did, it would be an unbearable win that destroyed the very meaning of winning.”

— Laini Taylor

432. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

435. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

437. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “No, tiny violent one.”

— Laini Taylor

448. “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

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

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor