145 Quotes & Sayings By Laini Taylor

She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust. . Laini Taylor

I..I sang, " she whispered, "if that matters, " and Karou felt her heart pulled to pieces. This Misbegotten warrior, fiercest of them all, had crouched in an icy stream bed to sing a chimera soul into her canteen, because she hadn't known what else to do. The singing wouldn't have mattered, but she wasn't going to tell Liraz that. If Ziri's soul was in that canteen, Karou would happily learn whatever song Liraz had sung and make it part of her resurrection ritual forever, just so that the angel would never feel that she'd been foolish. . Laini Taylor

I'm afraid they're in love, " he said, concerned. "They don't want to leave you." He lifted one hand from her waist to gently brush a pair from her neck, where their wings fanned against her jaw. Melancholy, he said, "I know just how they feel. Laini Taylor

Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star. Laini Taylor

Happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won--some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it--but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Laini Taylor

She'd spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened--apart from everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won--some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it--but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness. With hope that the weapons could in time vanish from the picture. . Laini Taylor

Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one's soul so entangled in it that you can't let it go, even if you try. If you feel it--if you really feel it--then you speak it like it's a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there's blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can't let go. Laini Taylor

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and .. I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them .. not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books. Laini Taylor

As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard. Laini Taylor

Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did the not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and her, mingled together, could... countervail each other? Laini Taylor

In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint.. Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire. Laini Taylor

War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It's ugly, and you don't even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know. Laini Taylor

Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees. Laini Taylor

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all. Laini Taylor

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books? Laini Taylor

He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all. Laini Taylor

It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented. Laini Taylor

Life and peace. Victory and vengeance. And never the twain shall meet. Laini Taylor

You really think joy is easier to come by than pain? What have you had more of? Laini Taylor

It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default–like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up. Laini Taylor

And Esme remembered in a rush--the wolfsong, the haunting, lyrical spirals of it in the dawn quiet and the feeling of euphoria that had attended it. Even in recollection the howling uplifted her like the crescendo at the end of a symphony and made her heartbeat quicken. Laini Taylor

It's alright, you know... To love him... Please, child, do you think I don't know you at all? I'm not going to say there is some easy future for you, or even any future at all. I only want you not to punish yourself. You've always felt the truth in him, then and now. Your heart is not wrong. Your heart is your strength. You don't have to be ashamed. Laini Taylor

She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. Laini Taylor

For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve–like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable. Laini Taylor

You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable, " she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."“ Beautiful and full of monsters?"“ All the best stories are. Laini Taylor

And that's how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can. Laini Taylor

Your soul sings to mine. My soul is yours, and it always will be, in any world. Laini Taylor

Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light. Laini Taylor

The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.... Laini Taylor

What's the point of being old if you can't beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom? And what's the point of being young if you can't ignore all advice? Laini Taylor

I think you're a fairy tale. I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story. Laini Taylor

Happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won-some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it-but something to carry doggedly through everything. Laini Taylor

She may have been the one whose name meant music, but his sounded like it. Saying it made her want to sing it, to lean out a window and call him home. To whisper it in the dark. Laini Taylor

If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it's real. Laini Taylor

Ignorance and power, they´re a poor combination. Laini Taylor

He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant. Laini Taylor

Skathis might have been an artist, but he'd been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile. Laini Taylor

She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it. Laini Taylor

I am a link in a chain Laini Taylor

To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength Laini Taylor

What do you think I live on, rainwater and daydreams? Laini Taylor

I’m not looking for fate. I’m seventeen. I’m looking for kissing, and to move forward a few paces on the game board. You know, do some Living. (With my lips.) Laini Taylor

As long as you're alive, there's always a chance things will get better. Laini Taylor

..and when he let her go, it was as if she had been filled and didn't realize it until he pulled away and the absence rushed back in. Laini Taylor

There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward–toward what? Laini Taylor

He didn't believe in magic and demons. He believed in day and night, endurance and fury, cold mud and loneliness and the speed with which blood leaves the body Laini Taylor

I don’t believe in prayer, but I do believe in magic, and I want to believe in miracles. Laini Taylor

His eyes are blue, and blue eyes up close are a celestial phenomenon: nebulae as seen through telescopes, the light of unnamed stars diffused through dusts and elements and endlessness. Layers of light. Blue eyes are starlight. Laini Taylor

To be one of a pair of bodies that knew that melting fusion. To reach and find. To be and reached for and found. To belong to a mutual certainty. To wake up holding hands. Laini Taylor

Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels. Laini Taylor

What was he? Storyteller and secretary and doer of odd jobs, neither Tizerkane nor delegate, just someone along for the dream. Laini Taylor

Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played. Laini Taylor

...something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone. Laini Taylor

The door opened. She looked in the mirror and suppressed a curse. Slipping in behind some tourists, that winged shadow was back again. Karou rose and made for the bathroom, where she took the note that Kishmish had come to de Laini Taylor

His shadow splayed out huge before him, and his mind gleamed with ancient wars and winged beings, a mountain of melted demon bones and the city on the far side of it--a city that had vanished in the mists of time. Laini Taylor

Life doesn’t need magic to be magical.( But a little bit sure doesn't hurt.) Laini Taylor

Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude, serene. But she wasn't. She was lonely, and she feared the missingness within her as if it might expand and.. cancel her. She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust. Laini Taylor

Home. the word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She'd done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the missingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough. Laini Taylor

What a lovely display of personhood. He's like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I'm fun but smart. You won't be able to put me down. Laini Taylor

Around Mik, my powers desert me. I lose basic motor function, like my brain focuses all neural activity on my lips and shifts into kiss preparedness mode way too early, to the detriment of things like speech, and walking. Laini Taylor

That widow’s peak is preposterous. God. It really makes you feel the sad dearth of widow’s peaks in daily life. We could, like, use him as breeding stock to seed widow’s peaks into the populace.”“ My god. What’s with all the mating and seed talk?”“ I’m just saying, ” Zuzana said reasonably. “I’m crazy about Mik, okay, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my part for the proliferation of widow’s peaks. As a favor to the gene pool. You would, too, right? Or maybe…” She shot Karou a sidelong glance. “You already have? . Laini Taylor

Let me tell you something about me. I love vengeance like normal people love sunsets and long walks on the beach. I eat vengeance with a spoon like it's honey. In fact, I may not even be a real person, but just a vow of vengeance made flesh. Laini Taylor

As to having a preference, that was new too. You take what you're given and you're grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one's own likes and dislikes could matter to other people. Laini Taylor

Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked. Laini Taylor

I can't imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she'd been right, but Liraz thought that she would now, She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn't reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and might-if she weren't Liraz and it weren't unthinkable-have been sobbing. In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and here's where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true. Laini Taylor

Life is you master, or death is. Laini Taylor

The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion–to close a door in one's own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering–and cause it–and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication. Laini Taylor

If only it were that easy to let go of hate. Just relax your face. Laini Taylor

You think good people can't hate?" she asked. "You think good people don't kill?"[...}" Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It's just that when they do them, they call it justice. Laini Taylor

Some kinds of misery make you hate the world, but some kinds make you hate yourself, and--butter and cheese not withstanding-- Neve had no question that Spear was the latter. Laini Taylor