Top 200 Samantha Shannon Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The room was an hourglass that hadn’t yet turned.”

— Samantha Shannon

152. “That to treat any one person as less than human was to cheapen the very substance of humanity.”

— Samantha Shannon

153. “They raise us to be soft as silk, distract us with luxury and wealth beyond measure, so we never rock the boat that carries us. They expect us to be so bored by our power that we let them do the ruling in our stead. Behind every throne is a masked servant who seeks only to make a puppet of the one who sits on it.”

— Samantha Shannon

154. “Elder Vara had managed, of course. The world could end and he would find a way to keep on reading.”

— Samantha Shannon

155. “A woman is more than a womb to be seeded.”

— Samantha Shannon

156. “It was as if her heart had been hooked from her mouth, caught like a fish on a line.”

— Samantha Shannon

157. “Ead helped her into a corset.”

— Samantha Shannon

158. “War has often been called a game, with good reason. Both have combatants. Both have sides. Both carry the risk of losing.”

— Samantha Shannon

159. “I have studied many books on human history, and if there is one thing I have learned from them, it is that it is not always possible to find reason in tradition. It is the same for Rephaim.”

— Samantha Shannon

160. “It was sleep, but not-sleep; a boundless darkness, settled by one soul. She had been chained here for a thousand years, but now, at last, she stirred.”

— Samantha Shannon

161. “But I missed talking to him. I missed just being near him. I wanted him – but what I wanted might be an illusion.”

— Samantha Shannon

162. “I am no green child to believe what I am told without proof.”

— Samantha Shannon

163. “Even a hawk cannot see the back of its own head.”

— Samantha Shannon

164. “He was capable of kindness, but he wasn’t kind. He could act like he cared, but it would always be an act.”

— Samantha Shannon

165. “She’d known I was coming, known what I was after, and she’d only started to speak English after seeing me. She was one of them. The scarred ones.”

— Samantha Shannon

166. “Damn you to the Womb of Fire.′ Sigoso smiled, ‘I am there,’ he said, ’and it is paradise.”

— Samantha Shannon

167. “And Wulf remembered he was flesh. He was skin papered on sinew, wrapped around bone, sprouting nails and teeth and hair, and all of it could be consumed.”

— Samantha Shannon

168. “Just going outside put me at risk of winding up dead or captured. If I let that daunt me, I’d never do anything.”

— Samantha Shannon

169. “I felt the thick beat of him. His rhythm. My rhythm.”

— Samantha Shannon

170. “Fire it was, purposefully wrought – fire as makes a blade, for slaughter. Its eyes seethed with flame, not good nor evil, the sanctarian read in her mind, but also that which makes a wyrm, that is, its cunning, and its malice.”

— Samantha Shannon

171. “A picture came, unbidden, of a stranger crushing into her. Her body taken over, laden, stretching and filling beyond her control, growing a seed that unfurled in the darkness. She knew that bringing it into the light would rip a deep scar through her mind, even if she recovered in the body. It would all pull so hard on her line that it broke her, leaving her to sink. She had known for many years that she would not do it by choice.”

— Samantha Shannon

172. “Have we met? Don’t tell me. You’re plainly a fool, and I have no interest in befriending fools.”

— Samantha Shannon

173. “We sat with our arms around each other, holding too tightly and not tightly enough.”

— Samantha Shannon

174. “You can convince yourself that you are nothing like me. Tell yourself that you are the black to my white, the queen that stood on the right side of the board. But one day, you will be faced with a choice, as we all are. One day you will have to choose between your own desires, your own darkest impulses, and what you know to be right... and it will harden you. You will understand that all of us are devils in the skins of men. You will become the monster that lives inside us all.”

— Samantha Shannon

175. “Pieter was depressed again. Being dead sometimes got to him.”

— Samantha Shannon

176. “Dices que deseas la verdad, pero la verdad es un tejido de muchos hilos.”

— Samantha Shannon

177. “Eadaz,’ Aralaq said. ‘Yes?’ ‘Do not follow stupid birds into dark places again.”

— Samantha Shannon

178. “No soy tu reina, pero soy tuya.”

— Samantha Shannon

179. “Within this impossible sea, every star, every constellation, every fold and spiral of the cosmos was reflected. As if there were two firmaments, and their ship was a ghost ship, adrift between worlds. The sea had turned itself to glass, so the heavens might finally look upon themselves.”

— Samantha Shannon

180. “The dragons watched her. It was said they could see the deepest secrets of a soul, for human beings were made of water, and all water was theirs.”

— Samantha Shannon

181. “All of us have shadows in us,” he said. “I accept yours.” He placed a hand over her ring. “And I hope you will also accept mine.”

— Samantha Shannon

182. “But be mindful, Eadaz. Do not lose your focus. It is the Mother who compels you, not this Inysh queen.”

— Samantha Shannon

183. “With the right reasons, at the right moment, even the most beaten and broken of people could rise up and reclaim themselves.”

— Samantha Shannon

184. “For as long as I had someone I could be myself with, I could bear to be someone else with him.”

— Samantha Shannon

185. “Remember that whoever and wherever you are, the realm of adventure will never be closed to you. You are your own shield.”

— Samantha Shannon

186. “Still, she imagined the loss of a loved one would hurt like an arrowhead lodged in the body. Life would grow and twine around it, but it would remain, always hurting.”

— Samantha Shannon

187. “Let us not think of the future this night. It is not yet dawn. We still have time for airy hopes.”

— Samantha Shannon

188. “You helped set me on this path, don’t you ever tell me how to walk it.”

— Samantha Shannon

189. “The first touch of our lips behind crimson drapes. The touch that should have been impossible. A collision of worlds, born of chaos and breaking, that had somehow been quiet as a moth taking flight.”

— Samantha Shannon

190. “What I know is less important than what the world sees,’ Kit said. ‘Allow me to indulge in a little allegory. Art. Art is not one great act of creation, but many small ones. When you read one of my poems, you fail to see the weeks of careful work it took me to build it – the thinking, the scratched-out words, the pages I burned in disgust. All you see, in the end, is what I want you to see. Such is politics.”

— Samantha Shannon

191. “All her life, she had been too fortunate.”

— Samantha Shannon

192. “She was born to be a shadow, and all shadows had to do was walk behind.”

— Samantha Shannon

193. “To die in the service of a better world would be the highest honor.”

— Samantha Shannon

194. “I want my child to have a queendom left to rule. I want her to taste apples still crisp from the orchard. I want her to see the green of Inysh spring; to know the scent of wildflowers, the taste of bread, the sound of laughter. I do not want her life to end at her first breath, her voice strangled away by smoke.”

— Samantha Shannon

195. “It was customary for the vows to be taken at midnight, during the new moon, for it was in the darkest hours that companionship was needed most.”

— Samantha Shannon

196. “She excels because she trusts her skill. I suspect you fear that yours will slip between your fingers if you loosen your grip for even a moment... I always wanted to prove to myself that I was worthy of it... All I did was practice. I forgot how to possess a skill. Instead, the skill posses me. All of me.”

— Samantha Shannon

197. “The moon was a half-closed eye, and they floated on water as dark as his thoughts.”

— Samantha Shannon

198. “I’m afraid Clarent is much the same. Sometimes he is in the present, sometimes in the past, and sometimes nowhere at all.”

— Samantha Shannon

199. “To call her that would prove that chaff could grow taller than grass.”

— Samantha Shannon

200. “I did not want to believe Ead,” she replied, “but I see that my affinity with you cannot be denied.”

— Samantha Shannon