Top 250 Sabaa Tahir Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “You humans give your loyalty so willingly for just a little hope.”

— Sabaa Tahir

202. “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

203. “There is hope in life.”

— Sabaa Tahir

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

209. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

214. “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

215. “Who my child becomes is not the sum of what happened to him.”

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

— Sabaa Tahir

218. “I throw her over my shoulder.”

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

220. “May death claim me first.”

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

224. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “I miss that girl. That Laia. That version of myself that burned brightest when Elias Veturius was near.”

— Sabaa Tahir

243. “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

244. “We never had much, but whatever we did have was made with love, which I now know transforms simple fare into a feast.”

— Sabaa Tahir

245. “Pain is a choice. Succumb to it and fail. Or defy it and triumph.”

— Sabaa Tahir

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

— Sabaa Tahir

247. “Why is it always us? All of these people – so many children – hunted and abused and tormented. Families stolen, lives shattered. They come all this way to be rejected yet again, sent outside the city walls to sleep in flimsy tents, to fight over paltry scraps of food, to starve and freeze and suffer more. And we are expected to be thankful. To be happy. So many are – I know it. Happy to be safe. To be alive. But it’s not enough – not to me.”

— 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