Top 40 Melissa Bashardoust Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I was always afraid the poison would make me a monster, but what if trying to get rid of it makes me more of a monster than I was before?”

— Melissa Bashardoust

2. “She liked to see the roses bloom for the first time in her garden, by her hand. It was proof that she could nurture as well as destroy.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

3. “You’re my favourite story. I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

4. “Do you see now why I recognized you? You’re my favorite story. I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

5. “But trust me when I say that if I were you, I wouldn’t shed my armor for the sake of a kind word or a gentle touch. That’s my advice to you, from one monster to another.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

6. “I don’t think you’re small or insignificant,” he said. His gaze softened, solemn rather than fierce. “I think you have so much power within you that it scares you, and that you make yourself small on purpose because you don’t know what you’ll become if a story than you ever stop.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

7. “He knew that if he raised his daughter without love, and that if he told her often enough that she wasn’t capable of it, she would soon start to prove him right, if only because it was all she’d ever known.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

8. “Parvaneh seemed to be made of the night. She wore it like a gown, draped over skin that shimmered in the moonlight.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

9. “She had read enough stories to know that the princess and the monster were never the same. She had been alone long enough to know which one she was.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

10. “Stories always begin the same way: There was and there was not. There is possibility in those words, the chance for hope or despair.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

11. “No, it wasn’t that he had killed them that bothered her – it was that he had done it so well.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

12. “She had always thought guilt was an emotion, but now she understood that guilt was a sickness, a fever.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

13. “If they love you for anything, it will be for your beauty.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

14. “All this time, she had thought of him as her persecutor and herself as the maligned victim of his pride, intimidated into submission because she refused to hurt him. But Ramin had been living in a different story, with himself as the hero, protecting his family from a demon in their midst that only he could recognize.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

15. “There’s something restless growing within you. We’re all very curious to see what happens when it breaks free.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

16. “You’ll find something that’s yours alone. And when you do, don’t let anyone take it from you.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

17. “She was herself and not herself – she didn’t know what she was, except that she was free.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

18. “There are worse things in the world to be than delicate. If you’re delicate, it means no one has tried to break you.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

19. “The only power she has over me now, is what power I chose to give her.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

20. “Perhaps in the tower room, high above the royal crypt, Lynet could put herself back together again.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

21. “Beautiful yet deadly, he had called her. Somehow, he made one sound as sweet as the other.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

22. “Very well, then. Be angry. Be violent. But not for his sake. Not to do as he commands. Be angry for yourself. Use that rage to fight him.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

23. “Weak or strong – she didn’t know what they meant anymore. Maybe they didn’t mean the same thing for everyone.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

24. “With her beauty as a distraction, no one would ever know that she was, deep down, hollow.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

25. “To anyone who has ever felt poisonous or monstrous or bristling with thorns.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

26. “His nearness was no longer just a shield now, but a kind of luxury, a sip of heady wine that she would probably never taste again. Was it so wrong to linger?”

— Melissa Bashardoust

27. “If her father had never truly recognized his daughter, then had he remembered his wife wrong as well? What is everything he’d ever told her about her mother was only how he’d seen her, not how she truly was.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

28. “Every time you shudder from the cold or wrap yourself more tightly in your furs, it reminds me that somewhere, the sun shines more brightly than it does here. You carry it in your skin.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

29. “Once hope was gone there was no point in fighting, and so she had no need for anger anymore.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

30. “The pressure was unbearable now, and her skin felt tight on her bones, like something was trying to burst out of her. It was the same feeling as in her nightmares, just before she awakened. Surrender or destruction, she thought. That was the way of divs. She could surrender to the div’s blood inside her, or she could let it destroy her.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

31. “I felt as if I already knew you, as if you were already mine. Didn’t you feel the same?”

— Melissa Bashardoust

32. “What if there was a loneliness even deeper than the one she felt now?”

— Melissa Bashardoust

33. “I have nothing else to lose now – except for you.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

34. “Sometimes the princess is the monster.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

35. “You were the only person who ever made me feel like I was the one worth protecting.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

36. “Well,” she said, holding her gloved hands out to him, “am I still your favorite story?”

— Melissa Bashardoust

37. “Yes, she knew who he was. She knew even before she had asked. She knew when she had looked up and seen him in place of the young man she had expected. But he still told her anyway. “I’m your favorite story,” said the Shahmar.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

38. “A princess had a secret lover who came to her window to see her. She let down her hair for him to climb and reach her, but he refused. He wouldn’t harm a hair on her head, he told her, and he sent for a rope instead. Soraya had revisited that story over and over again through the years, wondering if she would ever look out her window and see someone waiting for her, someone like that young man, who would care more about her safety than his own.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

39. “You should be afraid, she thought again. But this time it was not a hopeless wish, the complaint of a girl who always gave in, but a realization, a truth she finally believed. It was also a threat.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

40. “I dreamed of you for so long. I would do anything to be with you. Even this.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

41. “Are they truly your family if they’ve failed to accept you as their own? If they cast you out and treat you with disdain?”

— Melissa Bashardoust

42. “Would she ever become used to something as simple as the feel of someone’s hands on her skin? It seemed impossible.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

43. “Soraya watched her go through the gap between the door and the wall, and gently touched her cheek. Even after everything she had seen – demons and sorcerers and curses – there was nothing more astonishing or magical to Soraya than being able to touch Parvaneh.”

— Melissa Bashardoust

44. “If you told people what they most wanted to hear, they would almost certainly believe you.”

— Melissa Bashardoust