Top 250 Sabaa Tahir Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Children are born to break their mothers’ hearts, my boy.”

— Sabaa Tahir

52. “Strange, how silence can speak as loudly as a scream.”

— Sabaa Tahir

53. “Remember that fate is never what we think it will be.”

— Sabaa Tahir

54. “Love cannot live here.”

— Sabaa Tahir

55. “Disappear! I scream the word in my mind, queen of the desolate landscape therein, ordering her ragged troops to a last stand.”

— Sabaa Tahir

56. “I’ll survive this. I’ll live. But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.”

— Sabaa Tahir

57. “There is a price for greed and violence. We do not always know who will pay it. But for good or ill, it will be paid.”

— Sabaa Tahir

58. “You are full, Laia. Full of life and dark and strength and spirit. You are in our dreams. You will burn, for you are an ember in the ashes.”

— Sabaa Tahir

59. “Don’t look so worried. Most successful missions are just a series of barely averted disasters.”

— Sabaa Tahir

60. “I make myself smile at him – Pop always said you could never smile too much at a baby.”

— Sabaa Tahir

61. “I stare out at the desert, a speck of nothing against its vastness. These rocks, this dirt, it will abide for millennia, while I am but a moment in time that will be over all too soon. The thought is crushing, and I cannot breathe.”

— Sabaa Tahir

62. “How can you know someone for years and still not know their inner currents? I want to sink into the swirls and eddies of her ocean. I want to understand her. But I can’t unless she lets me.”

— Sabaa Tahir

63. “There is more to this life than love, Helene Aquilla. There is duty. Empire. Family. Gens. The men you lead. The promises you make.”

— Sabaa Tahir

64. “Shadows will bloom in your heart, and you will become everything you hate.”

— Sabaa Tahir

65. “I wonder if my entire life will be a series of moments in which I realize I’m an idiot long after I can actually do anything about it. Will I ever feel like I know what I’m doing?”

— Sabaa Tahir

66. “Perhaps I have become so accustomed to the burden of secrets that I do not notice their weight until I am free of it.”

— Sabaa Tahir

67. “Laia. The Scholar girl. Another ember waiting to burn the world down.”

— Sabaa Tahir

68. “May I offer you my congratulations, Commandant?” “On what?” “On the naming of the Aspirants. It’s all over the city. Your son – ” “Get out,” the Commandant says. She turns her back on the startled slaver, who quickly retreats, and settles her gaze on me. This thing actually spawned? What kind of demon had she whelped? I shudder, hoping I never find out. The.”

— Sabaa Tahir

69. “Most people... are nothing but glimmers in the great darkness of time. But you... are no swift-burning spark. You are a torch against the night – if you dare to let yourself burn.”

— Sabaa Tahir

70. “The permanence of death will always feel like a betrayal.”

— Sabaa Tahir

71. “Who is my brother now? When did he transform from the boy who made me too-sweet tea to a man with secrets too heavy to share with his little sister?”

— Sabaa Tahir

72. “And his mask. So strange that it sits atop his face like a thing apart. Is it a sign of weakness? It can’t be – I keep hearing he’s Blackcliff’s finest soldier. Stop, Laia. Stop thinking of him. If he’s thoughtful, then there’s devilry behind it. If there’s fire in his eyes, it’s a lust for violence. He’s a Mask. They’re all the same. I.”

— Sabaa Tahir

73. “The simulacrum tilts its head, just like Darin used to. “They’re hurting me, Laia.” It’s not Darin. My mind is slipping. This is guilt, fear. The voice changes, twisting and layering as if there are three Darins all talking at once. The light in the fake-Darin’s eyes goes out as quickly as a sun in a storm, and his irises darken into black pits, as if his entire body is filled with shadow. “I won’t survive it, Laia. It hurts.” The.”

— Sabaa Tahir

74. “How much pain exists in the world because we cannot get past what has been done to us, because we insist on inflicting pain right back?”

— Sabaa Tahir

75. “Or perhaps she’s simply beautiful, and looking at her feels like sunlight flowing into a room lost to the darkness for too long.”

— Sabaa Tahir

76. “For tonight, maybe we can just be Laia and Elias.”

— Sabaa Tahir

77. “Your mistakes only define the rest of your life if you let them. Don’t let them.”

— Sabaa Tahir

78. “Safety is an illusion never to trust.”

— Sabaa Tahir

79. “What a small thing it seems, to walk with the one you love. To look forward to a day with them. I marvel at the simplicity of this moment. And I thank the skies for the miracle of it.”

— Sabaa Tahir

80. “For me, Elias, desire is not simple. It is not shelter. It is not warmth. It is a fire that offers no light, only heat, ruinous and consuming. The longer you deny it, the hotter it burns. You forget shelter. You forget warmth. There is only that which you want and cannot have, and the desolation that follows.”

— Sabaa Tahir

81. “And while family can cause pain and make mistakes, it is never a burden. Never.”

— Sabaa Tahir

82. “If your sins were blood, child, you would drown in a river of your own making.”

— Sabaa Tahir

83. “Of my own mother and her quiet love, which bathed me like the rays of the sun for as long as she lived.”

— Sabaa Tahir

84. “Because you are loved,” I say. “You’re not alone. And you deserve to know that.”

— Sabaa Tahir

85. “The distance from one bit of luck to the next feels as great as the distance across oceans. But, I decide in this moment, I will bridge that distance, again and again, until I win. I will not fail.”

— Sabaa Tahir

86. “Love. I sigh. Love is joy coupled with misery, elation bound to despair. It is a fire that beckons me gently and then burns when I get too close. I hate love. I yearn for it. And it drives me mad.”

— Sabaa Tahir

87. “You got there first my love, I envy you so, for how will I endure without you?”

— Sabaa Tahir

88. “But if she survives, she is reborn. She rises from the shadow world of failure and despair so that she might become as fearful as that which destroyed her.”

— Sabaa Tahir

89. “There are two kinds of guilt,” I say softly. “The kind that’s a burden and the kind that gives you purpose.”

— Sabaa Tahir

90. “But it must be me. And in that moment, it hits me that with Livia gone, and until Zacharias comes of age, it will always be me. For a thousand things I don’t wish to do.”

— Sabaa Tahir

91. “She chuckles again. “Because sane plans never work, girl,” she says. “Only the mad ones do.”

— Sabaa Tahir

92. “Elias and I are finished. Now, there is only death.”

— Sabaa Tahir

93. “Perhaps grief is like battle: After experiencing enough of it, your body’s instincts take over. When you see it closing in like a Martial death squad, you harden your insides. You prepare for the agony of a shredded heart. And when it hits, it hurts, but not as badly, because you have locked away your weakness, and all that’s left is anger and strength.”

— Sabaa Tahir

94. “But I must prepare myself, for such stories are dragons drawn from a deep well in a dark place. Does one summon a dragon? No. One may only invite it and hope it emerges.”

— Sabaa Tahir

95. “The rest is just wishes and hope, the most fragile of things.”

— Sabaa Tahir

96. “You’ll never forget them, not even after years. But one day, you’ll go a whole minute without feeling the pain. Then an hour. A day. That’s all you can ask for, really.”

— Sabaa Tahir

97. “I never feared the night, not even as a child, but Blackcliff’s night is different, heavy with a silence that makes you look over your shoulder, a silence that feels like a living thing.”

— Sabaa Tahir

98. “It should have been him dancing with you.”

— Sabaa Tahir

99. “Laia is the wild dance of a Tribal campfire, while Helene is the cold blue of an alchemist’s flame.”

— Sabaa Tahir

100. “And his champions, those three flames in which he placed all his hopes – Laia of Serra, Helene Aquilla, and Elias Veturius – I smother those flames. For I have taken the Blood Shrike’s soul. The Waiting Place has taken the Soul Catcher’s humanity. And I will crush Laia of Serra’s heart.”

— Sabaa Tahir