Top 250 Sabaa Tahir Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The space he leaves is vast, that gnawing loneliness of showing your heart to someone only to find they never wanted to see it.”

— Sabaa Tahir

52. “Curse this world for what it does to the mothers, for what it does to the daughters. Curse it for making us strong through loss and pain, our hearts torn from our chests again and again. Curse it for forcing us to endure.”

— Sabaa Tahir

53. “I do not doubt, I do not hesitate. I am the Lioness’s daughter, and I have the Lioness’s strength.”

— Sabaa Tahir

54. “You are my temple,” I murmur as I kneel beside her. “You are my priest. You are my prayer. You are my release.”

— Sabaa Tahir

55. “Children are born to break their mothers’ hearts, my boy.”

— Sabaa Tahir

56. “You have suffered. You have created suffering. You have killed. But you have also paid. With your life, twice over now, and with your heart, with your mind. You have guided thousands of lost souls. You have saved thousands of lives. You have done good in this world. Which will define you? The good? Or the suffering?”

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

60. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

64. “Love cannot live here.”

— Sabaa Tahir

65. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

77. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

79. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

81. “Great passions grow into monsters in the dark of the mind; but if you share them with loving friends they remain human, they can be endured.”

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

92. “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

93. “Beauty’s a curse when one lives among men.”

— Sabaa Tahir

94. “True suffering lies in the expectation of pain as much as in the pain itself.”

— Sabaa Tahir

95. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

97. “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

98. “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

99. “I have survived this feeling before, and I will survive it again. In this fiery hellscape of a world, this mess of blood and madness, justice exists only for those who take it. I’ll be damned if I’m not one of them.”

— Sabaa Tahir

100. “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