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.”

“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?”

“What do you think I live on, rainwater and daydreams?”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I was going to say the beginning is the good part, when it's all sparks and sparkles, before they are inevitably unmasked as assholes.”

“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.”

“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?”

“In one of his darker moments, the irony started him laughing and he couldn't stop, and the sounds that came from him, before finally tapering into sobs, were so far from mirth they might have been the forced inversion of laughter-like a soul pulled inside out to reveal its rawest meats.”

“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.”

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

“And they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.”