Laini Taylor Quotes

It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it's tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion.

His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile.

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.

[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original—one emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn’t love… and it wasn’t hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling.It was shame. Shame never faded.

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.

My tiny scary friend is coming

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

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.

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.

What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?

Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there's no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

Papilio stomachus: fragile creatures, vulnerable to forst and betrayal.

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.

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.

Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.

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.

On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.

If you're afraid of your own dreams, you're welcome here in mine.

..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.

Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.

To eat or not to eat, that is the question: whether 'tis Nobler in the stomach to suffer the Slings and Arrows of outrageous Hunger (while keeping mouthparts in pristine kissing condition) or to take Spoon against Slice of cake, and--"Yes, please," my stomach pipes up.

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

It was the only lullaby she would ever sing, and it was sung in Hell.

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

It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.

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.

I want to touch with my mouth. His mouth, with my mouth. Maybe his neck, too. But first things first: Make him aware I exist.It’s possible that he is already aware, if only in a ‘don't step on the small girl’ kind of way.

I know it's not easy for you, living this life, but try to remember, always try to remember, you're not the only one with troubles.