Top 40 Malinda Lo Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Ash knew that this was what the fairies were always hunting for: a circle of joy, hot and brilliant, the scent of love in the deepest winter. But all they could do was create a pale, crystalline imitation, perfect and cold. How it must disappoint them: that they would never be human.”

— Malinda Lo

2. “Fairies were drawn to in-between times like Midsummer’s Eve, when the full weight of summer begins to tip the shorter days of Autumn; or Souls Night, when the spirits of the newly departed walk the land.”

— Malinda Lo

3. “Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have nothing keeping you attached to the ground?”

— Malinda Lo

4. “She’s having a hard time right now because you’re not what she expected. But we’re never what our parents expected. They have to learn that lesson.”

— Malinda Lo

5. “Are you like the girls in the book too? Because I think I am.”

— Malinda Lo

6. “The word felt dangerous, and also powerful, as if uttering it would summon someone or something.”

— Malinda Lo

7. “It wasn’t like chocolate, Lily thought. It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.”

— Malinda Lo

8. “To charge someone with love is a great responsibility; there will be an equal yet unexpected reaction.”

— Malinda Lo

9. “For in the depths of grief, sometimes one cannot tell the difference between illusion and reality.”

— Malinda Lo

10. “Now she was confused, as if she’d been reading a book that had several pages removed, but hadn’t realized the pages were gone until this moment.”

— Malinda Lo

11. “She knew that what she had read in Strange Season was not only scandalous, it was perverse. She should feel dirtied by reading it; she should feel guilty for being thrilled by it. The problem was, she didn’t. She felt as if she had finally cracked the last part of a code she had been puzzling over for so long that she couldn’t remember when she had started deciphering it. She felt exhilarated.”

— Malinda Lo

12. “An unfamiliar emotion swelled inside her at this image. A strangely sharp pang for a place she had never visited. For a people she resembled but did not know.”

— Malinda Lo

13. “Wake up. You are here.”

— Malinda Lo

14. “No one is more impressionable than young humans. They are fooled into thinking they can live forever, when in fact they are about to die.”

— Malinda Lo

15. “Ash felt her entire body move toward her, as if every aspect of her being was reorienting itself to this woman, and they could not be close enough. She.”

— Malinda Lo

16. “She was no longer in her body; she felt free. She was as small as drop of dew quivering on a spider’s web; she was a minute in an hour in a day in a million years.”

— Malinda Lo

17. “Here was her mother sitting down across from her, reaching for her hands and chafing them as if she were frozen. She felt the rub of her mother’s wedding ring against her skin, and her mother’s face swam into focus, her brown eyes full of the sharp worry of love, and Lily thought, You will never look at me like this again.”

— Malinda Lo

18. “There was probably a scientific explanation for it, but the older she got, the more she was inclined to give in to the feeling that these moments were glimpses into a world greater than this physical one. It was as if there were cycles that repeated themselves over and over, but most people never saw the repetition; they were too deeply enmeshed in their own path to see.”

— Malinda Lo

19. “Perhaps that was the most perverse part of this: the inside-outness of everything, as if denial would make it go away, when it only made the pain in her chest tighten, when it only made her emotions clearer.”

— Malinda Lo

20. “It is the way of life. It ends.”

— Malinda Lo

21. “Love is not what you fear, is it? You fear the loss of it.”

— Malinda Lo

22. “Fear will teach you where to be careful.”

— Malinda Lo

23. “Is it true?” she asked. “Is the tale true?” “What is true for your people is not true for mine,” he answered.”

— Malinda Lo

24. “At each intersection she cast skittish glances at the women waiting for the light to change, wondering if she was one of them too, or her, or her.”

— Malinda Lo

25. “Perhaps one day she’d get used to the way it made her feel: dislocated and dazed, never quite certain if the other half of her would stay offstage as directed. But tonight she felt as if she were constantly on the edge of saying or doing something wrong, and the effort of keeping that unwelcome half silent was making her sick.”

— Malinda Lo

26. “Democracy, at its root, is based on the faith that our representatives have our best interests at heart. If we as a nation no longer believe that they do, that may be even more disturbing than the idea that aliens are among us.”

— Malinda Lo

27. “The quiet afternoon opened up between them like a woman stretching her limbs.”

— Malinda Lo

28. “Birds. They’ve been all over the news. Birds crashing into skyscrapers; dozens of birds dying randomly in some suburb in Virginia. Birds. So when you said a bird crashed your car –.”

— Malinda Lo

29. “Something goes still inside Lily, as if her heart took a breath before it continued beating.”

— Malinda Lo

30. “She’d always thought there was something magical about the city, with its steep stairways and sudden glimpses of the bay between tall, narrow buildings. It felt expansive and full of promise, each half-hidden opening a reminder that the city she had been born in still held mysteries to discover.”

— Malinda Lo

31. “The greenwitches derided the philosophers as joyless old men afraid of magic, and the philosophers, not surprisingly, protested that they found much joy in the real world.”

— Malinda Lo

32. “A few hours at home and the Telegraph Club seemed more like a fantasy than a real thing. This troubled her. It felt as if someone had taken an eraser to her memory – to her very self – and rubbed at it, then blown away the remains.”

— Malinda Lo

33. “She didn’t understand the shrinking feeling inside her, as if she shouldn’t be caught looking at those girls.”

— Malinda Lo

34. “It also revealed the naked expanse of her back, the bones of her spine like a map for someone’s fingers.”

— Malinda Lo

35. “It wasn’t Lily who was the figurine in a diorama; it was her mother. Her mother was going round and round on that track, hearing only what she wanted to hear.”

— Malinda Lo

36. “But here’s the important thing when it comes to art. This is what I’ve learned: The art is greater than you and your feelings. You have to serve it. It is not you... Whatever you’re creating may come from within you and your life, but then... it walks away and affects other people you don’t know and have never met. That’s the beauty of it.”

— Malinda Lo

37. “The hurt felt real – much more real than the entire afternoon of staying silent. So she lay on the hard wooden floor between her brothers’ beds and let that ache fill her.”

— Malinda Lo

38. “To all the butches and femmes, past, present, and future.”

— Malinda Lo

39. “She could almost see the curve of the earth on the oceans horizon. Or she imagined that she could. And it gave her a physical sense of how far away from home she had traveled. Yes, she truly had come that far. No, she really wasn’t going home anytime soon. There was a strange sense of freedom in those thoughts. They left her free to be here, in this place, right now.”

— Malinda Lo

40. “It’s not a mistake,” Lily said miserably. Her mother strode across the kitchen and slapped her. Lily jerked backward, shocked. Her mother hadn’t hit her in years – since she was eight or nine – and she instantly felt like that child again, cowering in fear of another strike. With the terror came a crippling guilt and the belief that she must have done something awful, that she deserved this punishment.”

— Malinda Lo

41. “As if summer had bloomed inside the club and wrapped her in its lazy heat.”

— Malinda Lo

42. “Did that mean that she had always been destined to come here? To this city and this land so far from her home?”

— Malinda Lo