Laini Taylor > Quotes

“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“It's not like there's a law against flying."

"Yes there is. The law of gravity.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Oh, Hell. Must. Mate. Immediately.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Once upon a time, an angel lay dying in the mist.

And a devil knelt over him and smiled.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Stars got tangled in her hair whenever she played in the sky.”
― Laini Taylor

“Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters?”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“How much does your life have to suck to want the Apocalypse?”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Love is a luxury."
"No. Love is an element.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Love is a luxury."
"No. Love in an element."
An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“...You are not just going to vanish like this, Karou. This isn't some goddamn Narnia book.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“With the infinite patience of one who has learned to live broken, he awaited her return.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Like mold on books, grow myths on history.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“...something was starting to take shape, out of magic and will. Smoke and bone.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Skip meeting him? The butterflies, the pounding heart, the blushing? The part where you enter each other's magnetic fields for the first time, and it's like invisble lines of energy are drawing you together-”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“So violent. You want to mug and tase everybody these days."
"I do," Zuzana agreed. "I swear I hate more people every day. Everyone annoys me. If I'm like this now, what am I going to be like when I'm old?”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“There are other ways of showing someone you love them, such as fetching them out of Hell.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“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?”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“He was right. It made no sense at all, but the feeling flooded through Karou, and whatever it was, it was as sweet as a patch of sun on a glossy floor and, like a cat, she just wanted to curl up in it.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“It didn't escape Karou's notice that he found subtle ways of touching her.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“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 dreams, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“He actually listened, rather than pretending to listen while waiting a suitable interval before it was his time to talk again...”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“I've always imagined that one day the path of your life would lunroll at your feet and carry you away from us. As it should, as it must. But I am glad that day is not today.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Creatures with no dreams of their own can do naught but destroy the dreams of others.”
― Laini Taylor, Blackbringer

“Boredom is a terrible affliction of the soulless.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“[T]hey cupped their wings around their happiness and called it a world, though they both knew it was not a world, only a hiding place, which is a very different thing.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Kizzy wanted it all so bad her soul leaned half out of her body hungering after it, and that was what drove the goblins wild, her soul hanging out there like an untucked shirt.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“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.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone

“Everything lined up. It has been easy, as if it were meant-"
"Meant!" she said, amazed. She spun to face him, which, in the crush, brought her against his chest as if they were still dancing. She fought backward for space. As if what were meant?"
"You," he said. "And me”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone