Top 200 Samantha Shannon Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 5

201. “When you dream of change, it shines bright, like fire, and burns away all the rot that came before it. It’s swift and inexorable. You cry for justice, and justice is done. The world stands with you in your fight. But if there was one thing I had learned in these last few weeks, it was that change had never been that simple. That kind of revolution existed only in daydreams.”

— Samantha Shannon

202. “Then there was that awful slogan: no safer place. More like no safe place. Not for us.”

— Samantha Shannon

203. “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.’ With a tired smile, she threaded her fingers between his. ‘Gladly’.”

— Samantha Shannon

204. “Then he had come back into my life, and little by little, I had started to notice. That I looked forward to seeing him. That he made me smile without ever smiling himself. That he challenged me. That I always wanted to hear his voice. And that even though he was a mystery, and there were shadows in him I might never disperse, I somehow knew him.”

— Samantha Shannon

205. “Warden, please don’t dissuade me from the solitary mote of joy I have left in my tragedy of a life. I’m being hunted by a tyrant, my entire family is missing or dead, and I’m fresh out of the torture chamber. Please, just let me enjoy my coffee.”

— Samantha Shannon

206. “Loss had dogged her all her life. Little wonder she was holding on so tightly.”

— Samantha Shannon

207. “Loth smiled. “I’m glad you’re here, Kit.” “I should think so,” Kit said, his eyes shining.”

— Samantha Shannon

208. “How horrified they would.”

— Samantha Shannon

209. “You see, my lord,” Harlowe murmured. The light feathered in his eyes. “You can find beauty anywhere.”

— Samantha Shannon

210. “She dared not speak, for to show she knew his language was to forge a link between them, and to betray herself. To betray the fact that just as she was now a witness to his crime, he was a witness to hers.”

— Samantha Shannon

211. “The chamber was more like a cave than the rest of the Priory, dimmed to calm the mind. Passage from one womb to another – that was how she had seen it then, in the first clouded hour of holding him close. After the clearing, in her dreams, she remembered this room not as womb, but as tomb, as comb. No honey in a womb. No bees. She had brought him from the darkness to his end.”

— Samantha Shannon

212. “That is the problem with stories, child. The truth in them cannot be weighed.”

— Samantha Shannon

213. “I have an interest in survival, Lord Arteloth. I recommend you nurture one, too.”

— Samantha Shannon

214. “Part of me feared, before that night. That I was a fool for wanting to know you. For seeing you in everything, everywhere I turned,” he said. “I thought it was a sentence. A haunting. Until I realized it was a gift to be haunted by you.”

— Samantha Shannon

215. “We must never underestimate the value of libraries, or the urgency of the need to protect them, in a world that often appears to forget the importance of stories.”

— Samantha Shannon

216. “All you see, in the end, is what I want you to see. Such is politics.”

— Samantha Shannon

217. “With her wind-spun hair and eyes bright from the hunt, Sabran Berethnet looked almost carefree – and for the first time in years, Ead felt her own cares lifted from her shoulders. Like seeds from a dandelion clock.”

— Samantha Shannon

218. “In a time of starlight, fire must rise.”

— Samantha Shannon

219. “Love and fear do strange things to our souls. The dreams they bring, those dreams that leave us drenched in salt water and gasping for breath as if we might die.”

— Samantha Shannon

220. “Some revolutions change the world in a day. Others take decades or centuries or more, and others still never come to fruition. Mine began with a moment and a choice.”

— Samantha Shannon

221. “Writing didn’t carry the same risks as speaking. You couldn’t be shouted down or stared at. The page was both a proxy and a shield.”

— Samantha Shannon

222. “I didn’t believe in hearts. I believed in dreamscapes and spirits. Those were what mattered. Those made money. But my heart had hurt that day. For the first time in my life I’d been forced to acknowledge my heart, and acknowledge its fragility. It could be bruised. It could humiliate me.”

— Samantha Shannon

223. “His touch had felt strange. Warmer. It was only when I saw his hands that I realised. He wasn’t wearing gloves.”

— Samantha Shannon

224. “Books are to good for him.”

— Samantha Shannon

225. “Se nos juzga por el hoy, no por el ayer.”

— Samantha Shannon

226. “Be silent and learn something.”

— Samantha Shannon

227. “You told me once that freedom was my right.” I held his gaze. “Maybe you should do something with it.”

— Samantha Shannon

228. “We canna grieve for those who’ve gone. Not before we’ve fought to change the world that took them.”

— Samantha Shannon

229. “You have been away from the tree for too long. You are a root, beloved. You must drink, or you will wither.”

— Samantha Shannon

230. “There is enough of a story there to fill a book.”

— Samantha Shannon

231. “And she knew it would rip her apart, in the end – this yearning that pulled at the seams of her being, and the duty that sewed her tighter by the day, into the robes of the Empress of Seiiki.”

— Samantha Shannon

232. “He was not imposing in the physical sense; he was fine-boned, slim as a feather, almost delicate at first glance – but his eyes were dungeons. Once he had you in his gaze, you were his until he let it go.”

— Samantha Shannon

233. “He wouldn’t have understood if I’d told him why I spend my time with criminals. He didn’t know that I belonged with them. More than I belonged with him.”

— Samantha Shannon

234. “Arteloth, we are courtiers. We have no useful instincts.”

— Samantha Shannon

235. “A former exile who dabbles in alchemy and spent weeks in the employ of pirates. Yes, that sounds like someone they would want to mold the minds of the next generation.”

— Samantha Shannon

236. “She had not been human in that final hour. Just a paper lantern, thin and wind-torn, clinging to the flickering remnants of a soul. Yet when there was no more to climb, and she had looked up and seen nothing but the terrible beauty of the sky, she had found the strength to rise.”

— Samantha Shannon

237. “For Rephaim, it takes a long time for a flame to cath. But once it burns, it cannot go out.” It didn’t take long to understand what he meant. “But I will,” I said. “I’ll stop. I’ll go out.” There was a long silence. “Yes,” Warden said, very softly. “You will go out.”

— Samantha Shannon

238. “Every revolution begins with breakfast,’ I quoted as they left. ‘Is this your revolution, Jaxon?”

— Samantha Shannon

239. “I was only observing how the fiercest of warriors can hide behind such gentle faces.”

— Samantha Shannon

240. “When he slept, he dreamed his sheet were poisoned.”

— Samantha Shannon

241. “The wisest are seldom appreciated in their time.”

— Samantha Shannon

242. “It can be a lonely feeling, not knowing where you fit.”

— Samantha Shannon

243. “You have seen more of the world than others have written of it You could shake the dust from the lecterns, breathe life into the textbooks.”

— Samantha Shannon

244. “Sleep well, little dreamer.”

— Samantha Shannon

245. “Above, the tower. Emberlight and the pendant dark. Below, the hidden world that sheltered the forsaken. And I walked the liminal between them, with a god at my side and the streets like dying coals around us, waiting to be stoked. The fire was in the citadel, in his eyes, in my skin.”

— Samantha Shannon

246. “Onren looked over her shoulder at him. ‘I thought I heard you talking. Have we met?’ When he opened his mouth, she said, ‘Don’t tell me. You’re plainly a fool, and I have no interest in befriending fools.”

— Samantha Shannon

247. “An astronomer. I never thought I’d say this, but we need one.”

— Samantha Shannon