Laini Taylor Quotes

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.

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.

Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters?

Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.

It's not like there's a law against flying." "Yes there is. The law of gravity.

She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

Love is a luxury." "No. Love is an element." An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.

It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry 'Monster!' and looked behind him.

Your soul sings to mine. My soul is yours, and it always will be, in any world. No matter what happens. I need you to remember that I love you.

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.

Once upon a time, an angel lay dying in the mist. And a devil knelt over him and smiled.

It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.

A dream dirty and bruised is better than no dream at all.

I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.

Hey! My body may be small, but my soul is large. It’s why I wear platforms. So I can reach the top of my soul.

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

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 turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.

How much does your life have to suck to want the Apocalypse?

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil held a wishbone between them. And its snap split the world in two.

Oh, Hell. Must. Mate. Immediately.

Stars got tangled in her hair whenever she played in the sky.

Once upon a time, a little girl was raised by monsters. But angels burned the doorways to their world, and she was all alone.

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.

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.

I don't know many rules to live by,' he'd said. 'But here's one. It's simple. Don't put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles--drug or tattoo--and...no inessential penises either.' 'Inessential penises?' Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. 'Is there any such thing as an essential one?' 'When an essential one comes along, you'll know,' he'd replied.

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.

You are a conniving, deceitful hussy. I stand in awe." "You're sitting." "I sit in awe.

Like mold on books, grow myths on history.

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.

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.

Wasn't that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, 'My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.

It was brave," countered Issa. "It was rare. It was love, and it was beautiful.

Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.

Dead souls dream only of death. Small dreams for small men. It is life that expands to fill worlds. Life is your master, or death is

Nothing made you feel so useless as another person's grief.

With the infinite patience of one who has learned to live broken, he awaited her return.

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.

Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.

Yearning for love made her feel like a cat that was always twining around ankles, meowing Pet me, pet me, look at me, love me.

Your heart is not wrong. Your heart is your strength. You don't have to be ashamed.

Life won't just happen to you boy, he said. You have to happen to it.

...You are not just going to vanish like this, Karou. This isn't some goddamn Narnia book.

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.

People with secrets shouldn’t make enemies. People with destinies shouldn’t make plans.

Once upon a time,an angel and a devil pressed their hands to their hearts and started the apocalypse.

The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around

Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate.

Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.

She had a sadness that was so deep, but it still could turn to light in a second, and when I saw her smile I wondered what it would be like to make her smile. I thought... I thought it would be like the discovery of smiling.

Soldiers and children do as they're told. Children grow out of it, but soldiers just die.

Once upon a time, a girl lived in a sandcastle, making monsters to send through a hole in the sky.

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it's too late?

There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.

You have only to begin, Lir. Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.

The library knows its own mind,” old Master Hyrrokkin told him, leading him back up the secret stairs. “When it steals a boy, we let it keep him.

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

Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a new way of living—one without massacres and torn throats and bonfires of the fallen, without revenants or bastard armies or children ripped from their mothers’ arms to take their turn in the killing and dying. Once, the lovers lay entwined in the moon’s secret temple and dreamed of a world that was a like a jewel-box without a jewel—a paradise waiting for them to find it and fill it with their happiness. This was not that world.

Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.

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

Imagine if [Juliet] woke up and he was still alive, but..." She swallowed, waiting out a tremor in her voice. "But [Romeo] had killed her whole family. And burned her city. And killed and enslaved her people.

Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn't like being locked away.

She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair. She wasn't innocent now, but she didn't know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing.

So," he called to her back, "Just out of curiosity, you know, purely conversation and all, at what age will you be entertaining offers of marriage?" "You think it'll be so easy?" she called back over her shoulder. "No way. There will be tasks. Like in a fairy tale." "Sounds dangerous." "Very, so think twice." "No need," he said. "You're worth it.

We haven't been introduced. Not really.

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?

Sometimes a moment is so remarkable that it carves out a space in time and spins there, while the world rushes on around it. This was one such.

As long as you're alive, there's always a chance things will get better." "Or worse," said Liraz. "Yes," he conceded. "Usually worse." Hazael cut in. "My sister, Sunshine, and my brother, Light. You two should rally the ranks. You'll have us killing ourselves by morning.

Never repent of your own goodness, child. To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.

Once upon a time, there was only darkness. And there were monsters vast as worlds who swam in it.

I will give them nightmares to haunt their dreams long after I'm gone.

You were true to her, even if she was not to you. Never repent of your own goodness, child. To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of great strength.” “Strength,” she said with a little laugh. “I gave her strength, and look what she did with it.

Be a Samurai. Because you just never know what's behind the freaking sky.

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?

Liraz may have captured Ziri's soul like a butterfly in a bottle, but that was only a formality. It was already hers. And, clearly, judging by the state of her laugh-sobbing in Karou's arms, hers was his, too.

Hope is the real magic, child.

But he is pretty. God, I hope he's not an asshole. Do you think there's any chance he's both non-orifice and single? I mean, seriously. What are the chances?

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.

Once upon a time, the sky knew the weight of angel armies on the move, and the wind blew infernal with the fire of their wings.

The two of them were stoic and stone-faced and ten feet apart, currently not even looking at each other, but Zuzana had the impression of a pair of magnets pretending not to be magnets. Which, you know, only works until it doesn’t.

So violent. You want to mug and tase everybody these days." "I do," Zuzana agreed. "I swear I hate more poeple every day. Everyone annoys me. If I'm like this now, what am I going to be like when I'm old?" "You'll be the mean old biddy who fires a BB gun at kids from her balcony." "Nah. BBs just rile 'em up. More like a crossbow. Or a bazooka.

Hot, perpetually pissed-off angel seeks living pincushion for scowl practice and general stabbiness. No kissing.

Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat?

How could you tell if your instincts were just hope in disguise, and if your hope was really desperation parading as possibility?

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

Daughter of my heart,' was the message Brimstone sent just for Karou. She wanted to cry again right here in the court, thinking of it. 'Twice-daughter, my joy. Your dream is my dream, and your name is true. You are all of our hope.

She had fallen in love with him twice. She loved him now with both loves, so overpowering it was almost unbearable.

There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else. And if you choose the dream, if you keep on going, then you can never quit, because it's all you are.

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.

He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take.

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.

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.

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.

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

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.

Until a few days ago, humans had been little more than legend to him, and now here he was in their world. It was like stepping into the pages of a book -- a book alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos -- and the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy through a story, the light treating her differently than it did others, the air seemed to gather around her like held breath. As if this whole place was a story about her.

Be your own place of safety, she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife ticked in her boot - though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain - and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself.

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.

We’re playing Three Wishes,” she told her friend. “Cake, hot bath, soft bed. How about you?” “World peace,” said Karou. Zuzana rolled her eyes. “Yes, Saint Karou.” “Cure for cancer,” Karou went on. “And unicorns for all.” “Bluh. Nothing ruins Three Wishes like altruism. It has to be something for yourself, and if it doesn’t include food, it’s a lie.” “I did include food. I said unicorns, didn’t I?” “Mmm. You’re craving unicorn, are you?” Zuzana’s brow furrowed. “Wait. Do they have those here?” “Alas, no.” “They did,” said Mik. “But Karou ate them all.” “I am a voracious unicorn predator.

Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads. Kizzy wanted.