Top 250 Sabaa Tahir Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Needing protection is not a weakness. Refusing to trust your allies is.”

— Sabaa Tahir

152. “Skies save me from the men in my life and all the things they think they know.”

— Sabaa Tahir

153. “The problem with greedy people, Pop once said to me, is that they think everyone else is as greedy as they are.”

— Sabaa Tahir

154. “El sufrimiento es un monstruo, esperando ser liberado de una jaula.”

— Sabaa Tahir

155. “Give me your word as a Tribesman that you won’t double-cross me.” Even I know how valuable such a vow is. “I don’t trust you otherwise.” “You have my word.” He shoves me forward, and I stumble, just catching myself from falling. Swine! I bite my lip to keep from saying it. Let him think he’s cowed me. Let him think he’s won. Soon, he’ll realize his mistake: He vowed to play fair. But I didn’t.”

— Sabaa Tahir

156. “When the fear takes over, use the only thing more powerful, more indestructible, to fight it: your spirit. Your heart.”

— Sabaa Tahir

157. “You are young to stand so deeply in the shadow.”

— Sabaa Tahir

158. “I realize that some naiive sliver of me hoped that he was better than this. Not good, necessarily. Just not evil.”

— Sabaa Tahir

159. “Demetrius, who screamed in futile rage after he watched his ten-year-old brother whipped to death by the Commandant for desertion. He smiles when he sees me coming, drops his weapon and waits as if the edge of my blade is a gift. What does Demetrius see as the light leaves his eyes? His little brother waiting for him? An infinity of darkness?”

— Sabaa Tahir

160. “She’s still clinging to the side of her mountain, just like I’m still wandering lost in my battlefield.”

— Sabaa Tahir

161. “A mother carries her child’s innocence in her memory. No matter who they become. We carry our hopes and dreams for them and such things are woven into our souls as God is woven into the fibers of this earth.”

— Sabaa Tahir

162. “Would that we all knew the cracked terrain of each other’s broken hearts. Perhaps then, we would not be so cruel to those who walk this lonely world with us.”

— Sabaa Tahir

163. “I’m not – ” I consider. “Never mind. I am jealous. Tell me he’s old, at least? Or grouchy? Or maybe a bit stupid?” “He’s young. And handsome. And smart.” I snort. “He’s probably rubbish in be – ” Laia smacks me on the arm. “Battle,” I say quickly. “I was going to say battle.”

— Sabaa Tahir

164. “It’s nice to be admired, Laia, by someone who means well. It’s nice to be thought beautiful.”

— Sabaa Tahir

165. “Part of me wants desperately to shove my memories of him into the same dark room where my parents and sister live. The room that houses all my pain. But that room should not exist anymore. My family deserves to be remembered. Mourned. Often, and with love. And so does Harper.”

— Sabaa Tahir

166. “I’d say it’s impossible, but the Commandant trained the word out of me.”

— Sabaa Tahir

167. “I will tell you the same thing I tell every slave. The resistance has tried to penetrate this school countless times. I have discovered it every time. if you are working with the resistance, if you contact them, if you think of contacting them, I will know and i will destroy you.”

— Sabaa Tahir

168. “My song is not one of peace. It is one of failure and pain. My song is one of battle and blood, death and power. It is not the song of Helene Aquilla. It is the song of the Blood Shrike.”

— Sabaa Tahir

169. “You cannot walk in the shadows as long as I have and not become one.”

— Sabaa Tahir

170. “El miedo es solo tu enemigo si lo permites.”

— Sabaa Tahir

171. “Ah, no, my love.” He gathers me close. “You cannot go first. I could not make sense of the world if you did.”

— Sabaa Tahir

172. “Just because he’s a good leader doesn’t mean he’s a good person.”

— Sabaa Tahir

173. “I should just build a bleeding house here,” I mutter as I pick myself up off the snow-covered ground. “Maybe get a few chickens. Plant a garden.”

— Sabaa Tahir

174. “I don’t need to believe in the supernatural, not when there’s worse that roams the night.”

— Sabaa Tahir

175. “Sorry is a callous inadequacy.”

— Sabaa Tahir

176. “The thought appears in my head, but I hardly know what I means.”

— Sabaa Tahir

177. “She was our Tribe’s Kehanni, our tale-spinner, and she wove whole worlds with her voice, with the flick of a hand or the tilt of her head.”

— Sabaa Tahir

178. “Life is hard enough without having to avoid entire rooms in my own head.”

— Sabaa Tahir

179. “We are doomed, you and I. To offer more love than we will ever be given.”

— Sabaa Tahir

180. “I’ve known him all my life, Harper. But when I was crawling through that tunnel, when I knew he was fighting and dying for me, all I could think was that I was so thankful it wasn’t you up there. Because if it had been, we’d have died together.”

— Sabaa Tahir

181. “Thank you for giving your life, that I may continue mine.”

— Sabaa Tahir

182. “How cruel their beauty seems. Do they not know the evil that has taken place in their shadow?”

— Sabaa Tahir

183. “When you love, there is always more pain. “Men.”

— Sabaa Tahir

184. “But it’s still near, an enemy pacing impatiently outside the gates. And eventually, it bursts through, burning and reaving.”

— Sabaa Tahir

185. “All evil here. Monsters. Little monsters and then big ones.”

— Sabaa Tahir

186. “The freedom of this place, the ease of it – it feels like none of it is for me or my people. All this belongs to others, to those who do not abide at the crossroads of uncertainty and despair. It belongs to people so used to living free that they cannot imagine a world in which they are not.”

— Sabaa Tahir

187. “This is a bad idea,” he murmurs. We’re so close that I can see a long eyelash that’s landed on his cheek. I can see the hints of blue in his hair. “Then why aren’t you stopping it?” “Because I’m a fool.” We breathe each other’s breath, and as his body relaxes, as his hands finally slide around my back, I close my eyes. Then.”

— Sabaa Tahir

188. “I’m not alone.′ Laia buries her face in her mother’s hair. ‘I thought I was all that was left of us.”

— Sabaa Tahir

189. “I’m shoving my way past the crowds in the couriers’ office, and a hand lands on my waist. I instinctively jab back with my elbow to knock the wind out of the fool who thinks he can take liberties. Another hand catches my arm. “Laia.” A low voice murmurs into my ear. Keenan’s voice. My skin thrills at the familiar scent of him. He lets my arm go, but his hand tightens on my waist.”

— Sabaa Tahir

190. “I don’t look at the wound. I don’t need to. I watched the Commandant as she carved it into me, a thick-lined, precise K stretching from my collarbone to the skin over my heart. She branded me. Marked me as her property. It’s a scar I’ll carry to the grave.”

— Sabaa Tahir

191. “The voice is deep and soft, not a sound so much as a feeling. It is storm and wind and leaves twisting in the night. It is roots sucking deep at the earth, and the pale, sightless creatures that live below the ground. But there’s something wrong with this voice, something diseased at its core.”

— Sabaa Tahir

192. “The stars are so different when you’re free.”

— Sabaa Tahir

193. “The Tribespeople say that the heavens live under the feet of the mother,” he says. “So great is their sacrifice. And indeed no one suffers in war more than the mother. This war will be no different.”

— Sabaa Tahir

194. “Look at me. Don’t make me face this alone.”

— Sabaa Tahir

195. “Above, the heavens glow, the sky pale with starlight. Some long-buried part of me understands that this is beauty, but I am unable to wonder at it, the way I did when I was a boy. Back then, I clambered up spiky Jack trees to get closer to the stars, sure that a few feet of height would help me see them better. Back then, my world had been sand and sky and the love of Tribe Saif, who saved me from exposure. Back then, everything was different.”

— Sabaa Tahir

196. “The Scholars around us scatter, running every which way, driven by a fear that’s been hammered into our bones. Always us! Our dignity shredded, our families annihilated, our children torn from their parents. Our blood soaking the dirt. What sin was so great that Scholars must pay, with every generation, with the only thing we have left: our lives?”

— Sabaa Tahir

197. “The Empire trained us. It made us what we are. But at some point, you accepted it.”

— Sabaa Tahir

198. “She has no idea how pretty she is – or what kind of problems her beauty will cause for her at a place like Blackcliff. The wind pulls at her hair again, and I catch her scent – like fruit and sugar.”

— Sabaa Tahir

199. “No matter how rich and varied the lives of humans, they were falling stars in my world. They flared bright and brief, and then they burned out.”

— Sabaa Tahir

200. “The only place you’ll find a map of Blackcliff,” a raspy voice intrudes, “is in the Commandant’s head. And I don’t think you want to go rummaging around in there.”

— Sabaa Tahir