Laini Taylor Quotes

In truth, she had claim to no nationality. Her papers were all forgeries, and her accents -all except one, in her first language, which was not of human origin- were all fakes.

He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.

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

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.

Sorry," said Mik. "I think you neutralized our capacity for surprise. You should have started with that, and *then* told us you raise the dead.

He actually listened, rather than pretending to listen while waiting a suitable interval before it was his time to talk again ...

It seems right that Mik should be awakened in the same way. That we should lose our magic virginity the same way. To creepy puppets, during snowstorms.
(Okay. That sounds so wrong. But you know what I mean.)

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.

Judging from the array of swords and axes and daggers and bows and other implements of killing and dismemberment that they carried around, she gathered that manual dexterity was an imperative.
The better to kill you with, my dears.

Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you're trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.

As far back as she could remember, a phantom life had mocked her with its impenetrable "something else," but now it was the opposite. Here, in the circle of Akiva's presence, even as they spoke of war and siege and enduring enmity, she felt herself being drawn into the warm absoluteness and rightness of him, like he was both place and person and, contrary to all reason, exactly where she was supposed to be.

Karou's smile was pure; she was happy to give happiness.

There was some new quiet in her, but it didn't shrink or wilt her. Rather, it seemed to enlarge her. She was no mere weapon as she was trained to be, but a woman in full command of her power, unbowed and unbroken, and that was a dangerous thing.

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

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

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.

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

Love that sets forth the soul like springtime and ripens it like summer. Love as rarely exists in reality, as if a master alchemist has taken it and distilled out all the impurities, every petty disenchantment, every unworthy thought, into a perfect elixir, sweet and deep and all-consuming.

We're all on the same side. Even her. You can be on the same side and have different ideas.

She looked at him, beautiful Kazimir whose smile used to work on her like a summons, compelling her to his side.

And ... it's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse.

Well, I'm no alchemist," Lazlo said, affable. "You know me, Strange the dreamer, head in the clouds." He paused and added with a grin, "Miracles for breakfast.

The gods had been dead for fifteen years, after all, but their hate had lingered, and ruled in their stead.

Is life worth keeping on with, whatever happens?" Was she talking about living broken, living with loss? Did she count his loss a real one, and did she really want to know or was there a barb in this somewhere? Sometimes, Akiva felt like he didn't know his sister at all. "Yes," he said, wary, thinking of the thurible, and Karou. "As long as you're alive, there's always a chance things will get better."
"Or worse," said Liraz.
"Yes," he conceded. "Usually worse.

A dream, just a dream. Damn it. How had it gotten in? Lurking vulture dreams, circling, just waiting for her to nod off.

There is unique pleasure in introducing the bizarre and inconceivable to others.

That day and night, the bleeding and the screaming, had knocked something askew for Esme, like a picture swinging crooked on a wall. She loved the life she lived with her mother. It was beautiful. It was, she sometimes thought, a sweet emulation of the fairy tales they cherished in their lovely, gold-edged books. They sewed their own clothes from bolts of velvet and silk, ate all their meals as picnics, indoors or out, and danced on the rooftop, cutting passageways through the fog with their bodies. They embroidered tapestries of their own design, wove endless melodies on their violins, charted the course of the moon each month, and went to the theater and the ballet as often as they liked--every night last week to see Swan Lake again and again. Esme herself could dance like a faerie, climb trees like a squirrel, and sit so still in the park that birds would come to perch on her. Her mother had taught her all that, and for years it had been enough. But she wasn't a little girl anymore, and she had begun to catch hints and glints of another world outside her pretty little life, one filled with spice and poetry and strangers.

World peace for dinner," mused Mik, scratching his beard stubble. "Does that come with fries?"
"It freaking better," said Zuzana. "Or I will send it freaking back.

Sarai had a new, disconcerting awareness of herself, as though she'd never realized how many moving parts she had, all to be coordinated with some semblance of grace. It worked itself out so long as you didn't think about it. Start worrying, though, and it all goes wrong. How had she gone her entire life without noticing the awkwardness of arms, the way they just hang there from your shoulders like links of meat in a shop window? She crossed them - artlessly, she felt, like some arm amateur taking the easy way out.

You're like a kid when her parents come home from a party, checking their pockets for cake."
"Ooh, cake. I'll take cake. But not pocket cake, because yuck.

From: Zuzana Subject: Miss Radio Silence To: Karou

This is Weep. You can't expect things to make sense here."

Thyon didn't agree. "I expect they make perfect sense," he said. "Just under a different set of rules." It was a matter of learning the rules, like learning a new language.

Tommorrow they will start the apocalypse.
Tonight, they will let themselves look at each other, for just a little while.

Singing ballads whose words had never known paper but lived only on the rasping edge of their own voices.

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.

Is that all souls are for? For when we die?"
"No. They're for living, too.

Zuzana arched an eyebrow. She was a master of the eyebrow arch, and Karou envied her for it. Her own eyebrows did not function independently of each other, which handicapped her expressions of suspicion and disdain.

Once upon a time, a sister made a vow she didn't know how to break, and it broke her instead.

Once upon a time, a girl did the impossible, but she did it just a little too late.

No, tiny violent one.

There was only present, and it was infinite. The past and the future were just blinders we wore so that infinity wouldn't drive us mad.

If it's not chocolate, it's not breakfast.

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.

I admit, I prefer an open mind to a closed one.

Push the chair in too quickly or too slowly, or else sit too soon or too heavily, and misadventure ensues, perhaps even an unintended baptism of the hindquarters.

He had crossed continents and drunk starlight from rivers without names. There was no going back from that.

Kindly confirm: If someone's evil, then killing them isn't murder. It's SLAYING, and not only legal but encouraged. Correct?

He remembered a story Madrigal had told him once: the human tale of the golem. It was a thing shaped of clay in the form of a man, brought to life by carving the symbol aleph into its brow. Aleph was the first symbol of an ancestral human alphabet, and the first letter of the Hebrew word truth; it was the beginning. Watching Karou rise to her feet, radiant in a fall of lapis hai, in a woven dress the colour of tangerines, with a loop of silver beads at her throat and a look of joy and relief and ... love ... on her beautiful face, Akiva knew that she was his aleph, his truth and beginning. His soul.

But how do you stop someone from crying? How do you lead them out of fear?
Can hate be reversed?
Can revenge be diffused?

It was hope, dying unsurprised.

Live bitter, so the crows will have no taste for you when you're dead.

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

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

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I can touch you," she marveled, and she couldn't
or at least didn't
resist the urge to further prove it by sliding her palm over the hot-smooth terrain of his chest until she felt as if she were holding his heartbeat in her hand.
"As much as you want," he said, and there was a trembling in him, but it wasn't from pain.

He was inside that realm of mind, the private universe, the infinite sphere of himself where he went to work magic.

And he was her one true person, settled and sure, for life

Many a choice is made this way: By pretending it makes itself.

There are other ways of showing someone you love them, such as fetching them out of Hell.

She was lonely, and she feared the missingness within her as if it might expand and ... cancel her.

It was so dark, it was almost black and it melted on her tongue into an ancient flavor of seed pod, earth, shade, and sunlight, its bitterness casting just a shadow of sweet. It tasted ... fine, so subtle and strange it made her feel like a novitiate into some arcanum of spice.

There was no more happiness. But under the misery, there was hope.

That the name brimstone had given her was more than a whim.

That this was not the end.

To the naked eye, he's decent kissing height if I wear platforms, though of course a live test will be required before official certification of Kissing Compatibility can be issued.
It will be issued.
Soon.
Or I might implode.

Every night she bore witness to what she could never have. It wasn't living. It was torture.

Men should have squint lines from looking at the horizon," the old librarian had said, "not just from reading in dim light.

It had worked. She understood. Things can kill you. All kinds of things, like toys, or older brothers. And as she'd grown up, that list had just gotten longer and longer.

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

Back home in Florida, in a small town in Apalachicola National Forest, everyone had known who she was.

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.

Few will ever witness an act destined to become legend. How does it happen, that the events of a day, or a night - or a life - are translated into story? There is a gap in between, where awe has carved a space that words have yet to fill.

Elemental. Love is an element, Karou remembered from a long, long time ago, and she felt like she was floating.

You almost hold up your piece of paper and say, 'The girl I like just gave me a treasure map to herself.' But you don't. You just don't.

I cup the bead in my hand and smile as I drift toward sleep, wondering what my rainy days are going to look like now. As good as my snowy ones, I think. I'm going to need a bigger umbrella.

Absence has presence, sometimes, and that was what she felt. Absence like crushed-dead grass were something has been and is no longer. Absence where a thread has been ripped, ragged, from a tapestry, leaving a gap that can never be mended.

And at that moment, for no reason he could put into words, the hourglass shattered. No more, the cool gray sift of days, the diligent waiting for the future to trickle forth. Lazlo's dream was spilled out into the air, the color and storm of it no longer a future to be reached, but a cyclone here and now. He didn't know what, but as surely as one feels the sting of shards when an hourglass tips of a shelf and smashes, he knew that something was happening.
Right now.

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.

Her body may have been wrought with diamonds, but her soul within will be a soft mollusk thing, wet and shrinking ... and easily pushed aside.

The simplicity of it filled her with warmth. They had looked for her, and found her; she wasn't alone, after all.

My tiny scary friend is coming here.

Karou who had, a lifetime past, begun this story on a battlefield, when she knelt beside a dying angel and smiled. You could trace a line from the beach at Bullfinch, through everything that had happened since - lives ended and begun, wars won and lost, love and wishbones and rage and regret and deception and despair and always, somehow, hope - and end up right here, in this cave in the Adelphas Mountains, in this company.

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.

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.

Karou enjoyed the idea that you could "believe what you want," as though reality were a buffet line. If only. Triple helpings of cake, please.

It gave her a creeping sense of impending aloneness, like she was some orphaned animal raised by do-gooders, soon to be released into the wild.
She didn't want to be released into the wild. She wanted to be held dear.

Now more than ever she struck him like a fairy in a tale - a haunted one with shadowed eyes and a sting like a scorpion.

He was angles and darkness, her opposite - a moon-creature to her sun, a slicing shadow to her glow. But that was all silhoutte. It was in his smile, and in his eyes, and in his waiting - he was still waiting - that she saw him, and knew him. Strength and grace and loneliness and longing.
And hope.

An idea fell like a seed and over the next weeks it went on growing like a fig vine lush and conquering twining round her old beliefs and covering them in new growth until they were as invisible as a tiger in a thicket and just as deadly.

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

She would choose her family. Anything else was unthinkable,

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.

By contrast, the grime of her journey, the outré inappropriateness of the state of her, it felt like armor.
I earned this dirt.
Respect. The dirt.

Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts.
In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.

She had said she didn't feel fear, but it was a lie; this was her fear: being left alone. Because of one thing she was certain, and it was that she could never love, not like that. Trust a stranger with her flesh? The closeness, the quiet. She couldn't imagine it. Breathing someone else's breath as they breathed yours, touching someone, opening for them? The vulnerability of it made her flush. It would mean submission, letting down her guard, and she wouldn't. Ever. Just the thought made her feel small and weak as a child ...

As long as he had life, who deserved it so little, he would use it, wield it, and do whatever he could in its name, even if it was not, was never, enough

This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings.

Every mind is a world of its own

I have scuppies in my pocket and lust in my heart. Tonight's the night.

It was what she had always wanted and thought that she'd found: someone who was for her, as she was for him, whose blood and butterflies sang to hers and answered them, note for note. But

It was not a happy ending but a happy middle
at last, after so many fraught beginnings.

Long life is a burden, when it's spent in misery.

Magic won't save us. The power it would take to conjure on such a scale, the tithe would destroy us. The only hope ... is hope. You don't need tokens for it- it's in your heart or nowhere. And in your heart, child, it had been stronger than I have ever seen.

As she walked, clock towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close.