Top 250 Sabaa Tahir Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “We must understand the creatures, fey or human, who populate our tales. Respect them. Love them, despite the villainous things they do. We must see them. Else how will our stories echo in the hearts of those who hear them? How will the stories survive beyond one telling?”

— Sabaa Tahir

202. “You’re not like the others. You killed to save. You put others first.”

— Sabaa Tahir

203. “You humans give your loyalty so willingly for just a little hope.”

— Sabaa Tahir

204. “But I’ve never been great at staying angry. My memory eats at the edges of it.”

— Sabaa Tahir

205. “Pop used to say that standing by someone during their darkest times creates a bond. A sense of obligation that is less a weight and more a gift.”

— Sabaa Tahir

206. “There is hope in life.”

— Sabaa Tahir

207. “Everyone believes that nothing concerns them until the monsters are knocking on their doors!” She winces at my shriek, but I do not care. “Until they are burning down your homes and destroying your lives and killing your families!”

— Sabaa Tahir

208. “And he is my ally – the only person who can help me save my brother, Darin, from a notorious Martial prison.”

— Sabaa Tahir

209. “Now it hits me. This is it. This is the end. Martial tradition says a soldier who dies well dances among the stars, battling foes for all eternity. Is that what awaits me? Or will I slip into endless darkness, unbroken and quiet?”

— Sabaa Tahir

210. “I am alone, and I am a Mask.”

— Sabaa Tahir

211. “Don’t make vows when you don’t know the cost.”

— Sabaa Tahir

212. “He melts into the crowd, and I hurry back toward Blackcliff. If Izzi knows of an entrance, I still have time to see it for myself and head back here to pass along the information. The Resistance can get Darin out, and I’ll be done with all of this. No more scars or whippings. No more terror and fear. And maybe, a quiet part of me whispers, I’ll get more than just a few moments with Keenan. I.”

— Sabaa Tahir

213. “You will be chained to the darkness within yourself as surely as if chained to the walls of a prison cell.”

— Sabaa Tahir

214. “A bloody gloaming then, and bloodier still as twilight fades to dawn.”

— Sabaa Tahir

215. “After I pull my eyes away from her, I realize that I’m not the only one dumbstruck. Many of the young men around me sneak glances at her. She doesn’t seem to notice, which, of course, makes her all the more intriguing.”

— Sabaa Tahir

216. “I tear strips of cloth off my shirt and wrap my feet. I have only what I fell asleep with – my fatigues and my dagger. I’m suddenly, fervently grateful that I was too exhausted from combat training to strip before sleeping. Traveling the Great Wastes naked – that would be its own special sort of hell.”

— Sabaa Tahir

217. “I have defied him and survived him again and again. He has tried to hurt me. But I will not allow myself to be hurt. He has tried to break me but I will not be dictated to by a man so afraid to fight the jinn that he must criticise a woman to make himself feel bigger.”

— Sabaa Tahir

218. “I was eighteen. Full of fear. I should have prayed instead for a man unbroken.”

— Sabaa Tahir

219. “What is the point of learning to be brave if we’re not brave for the right reasons?”

— Sabaa Tahir

220. “I throw her over my shoulder.”

— Sabaa Tahir

221. “Elias,′ he says after a moment, the slightest bit of warmth entering those cold gray eyes. ‘From you I prefer Elias.”

— Sabaa Tahir

222. “May death claim me first.”

— Sabaa Tahir

223. “Willpower alone cannot change one’s fate.”

— Sabaa Tahir

224. “So many bleeding, stupid questions. Do girls think like this all the time? No wonder they’re so confusing.”

— Sabaa Tahir

225. “Slavers catch lies the way spiders catch flies.”

— Sabaa Tahir

226. “Come on, I want to add. But doing so would be like tattooing “I am up to no good” on my forehead.”

— Sabaa Tahir

227. “I miss you.” I hope she hears what I’m truly saying. I love you. I’m sorry. I wish I could fix it. “I’ll always miss you. Even when I’m a ghost.”

— Sabaa Tahir

228. “Look at you, little sister,” Darin finally whispers. His smile is the sun rising after the longest, darkest night. “Look at you.”

— Sabaa Tahir

229. “His beauty would have been intimidating, but his hands told the truth.”

— Sabaa Tahir

230. “The world seems to slow, as if time no longer exists. It is a moment of perfect chaos, and within it, I hear my nan. Where there is life, there is hope. I will not accept death. Why should I, when there is life yet burning in my veins?”

— Sabaa Tahir

231. “I wonder if he has a sister, a wife, a woman. But it wouldn’t matter if he did. To him, I’m not someone’s family. I’m just a thing to be subdued, used, and discarded.”

— Sabaa Tahir

232. “Woh harh jagah mojood heh. Iss ghar keh dar-o-diwar bhee rotay-henh.”

— Sabaa Tahir

233. “I am fully, foolishly in love with him. He is the weak spot in my armor, the flaw in my defense. Damn my traitorous heart to the hells.”

— Sabaa Tahir

234. “After we left Serra,” Keenan says, “we’d been walking – running, really, for hours. When we finally stopped and settled into our rolls for the night, she looked up and said, ‘The stars are so different when you’re free.’” Keenan shakes his head. “After running all day, eating hardly anything, and being so tired she couldn’t take another step, she fell asleep smiling at the sky.”

— Sabaa Tahir

235. “You do not re-enter your home until your guest is on the way to their own.”

— Sabaa Tahir

236. “This life is jihad – struggle,” Shafiq says. “Sometimes the struggle is more than any sane person can bear. I won’t judge your father for his jihad, Salahudin. How dare I, when I couldn’t begin to understand it?”

— Sabaa Tahir

237. “Our stories breathe, Laia of Serra. The stories we tell have power, of course. But the stories that go untold have just as much power, if not more. I will sing you such a story- a story that was long untold. The story of a name and its meaning. Of how that name matters more than any other single word in existence.”

— Sabaa Tahir

238. “In the middle of her rant, I walk away. Like she’s a dog barking at me instead of a human talking.”

— Sabaa Tahir

239. “What I feel for Elias is different, a flame I hold close to my heart when I feel my strength flagging. Sometimes, deep in the night as I travel, I picture a future with him. But I dare not look at it too closely. How can I, when it can never be?”

— Sabaa Tahir

240. “Part of me wants to ask him if I have made the right decision. After so many mistakes, I yearn for the reassurance that I haven’t ruined everything yet again. He will say yes, of course. He will comfort me and tell me this is the best way. But doing the right thing now does not undo every mistake I have already made. So I do not ask. I simply nod and follow as he leads the way. Because after all that has happened, I do not deserve comfort.”

— Sabaa Tahir

241. “I can take something for her, something small. Flowers? I look around the school grounds. Blackcliff doesn’t have flowers. Maybe I’ll give her a dagger. There are plenty of those around, and skies know she needs one.”

— Sabaa Tahir

242. “I wish now that I hadn’t opened up to him. “Ah, Laia-aapan.” He uses the Mariner honorific for little sister and jostles me with an arm. “We’ve all made mistakes in love. Me most of all.”

— Sabaa Tahir

243. “Three thousand bodies swing forward, three thousand pairs of boots snap together, three thousand backs jerk as if yanked straight by a puppeteer’s hand. In the ensuing silence, you could hear a tear drop.”

— Sabaa Tahir

244. “I stare at her, realize I’m staring, tell myself to stop staring, and then keep staring.”

— Sabaa Tahir

245. “A shadow fills the space where he stood, familiar and utterly changed at the same time. “E-Elias?” “I’m here.” He hauls me to my feet. He is lean as a rail, and his eyes appear to almost glow in the thickening smoke. “Your brother is here. Tas is here. We’re alive. We’re all right. And that was beautifully done.” He nods to the soldier, who has ripped the dagger out of his thigh and is now crawling away. “He’ll be limping for months.” I.”

— Sabaa Tahir

246. “This is not the tiredness of interrogation or a long journey. It is the exhaustion of a body that’s nearly done fighting. Just get through today, I tell myself. Then you can die in peace.”

— Sabaa Tahir

247. “Life isn’t scary enough for you, girl?”

— Sabaa Tahir

248. “I’m not going to kill you,” I say, nestling the blade into his neck. “Just wanted you to know I could. Now take me to my execution, Emperor.”

— Sabaa Tahir

249. “The chaiwallah brought sabz chai, Kashmiri-style. It was pink and milky, sprinkled with cardamom and brimming with crushed pistachios and almonds. A romantic tea, I always thought.”

— Sabaa Tahir

250. “In this fiery hellscape of a world, this mess of blood and madness, justice exists only for those who take it.”

— Sabaa Tahir