Top 250 Sabaa Tahir Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

54. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

56. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

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. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “But I’m not strong. I’m weak, and I’m sick of pretending I’m not.”

— Sabaa Tahir

70. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

74. “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

75. “I miss you. I’ll always miss you. Even when I’m a ghost.”

— Sabaa Tahir

76. “It is not all that I wanted. But it is not nothing either.”

— Sabaa Tahir

77. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

80. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

83. “But mostly it taught me that music can be more of a home than four walls and a roof.”

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

86. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

89. “There will be so much more in between. So much uncertainty. I don’t know if we’ll survive the catacombs, let alone the rest of it. But it doesn’t matter. For now, these steps are enough. These first few precious steps into darkness. Into the unknown. Into freedom.”

— Sabaa Tahir

90. “Because I know this feeling sweeping through me all too well, the feeling that all my effort, all I have worked for, means nothing. That everything and everyone is a lie. That all is cruel and unforgiving and that there is no justice.”

— Sabaa Tahir

91. “She feels out the melody the way a blind man feels his way forward in an unfamiliar room.”

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

95. “Strange how monsters can reach from beyond the grave, as potent in death as they were in life.”

— 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. “She was not of my body or my blood, this child. But she was of my soul.”

— Sabaa Tahir

98. “I will find you, Laia. I will find a way. This is not our end.”

— Sabaa Tahir

99. “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

100. “No one wants to fight for nothing.”

— Sabaa Tahir