Empire of the Damned (Empire of the Vampire, #2)

by Jay Kristoff

‘Measure yourself not by where others are, but where you used to be.’

This world won’t give you what you want just because you asked nicely, girl. Not respect. Not love. Not peace. You get what you earn. You eat what you kill.’

The right book is worth a hundred blades.’ “‘All I’m saying is a book won’t cut your next purse or steal your next supper.’ “‘But they might teach you a better way to do both.’

‘A life without books is a life not lived, Dior. There’s a magik like no other to be found in them. To open a book is to open a door—to another place, another time, another mind. And usually, mademoiselle, it’s a mind far sharper than your own.’

Fear is their blade. Despair their cloak.

I heard ye were dead, de León.’ “‘Heaven was full. And the devil was afraid to open the door.’ “‘Then the devil is a coward.’

“Truth is the sharpest knife,”

‘Castles are made of stone, Little Mountain. And so are you.’”

“It is only through falling that we teach ourselves to fly. Our measure be not in how many times we stumble, but how oft we rise. Failure is how we learn.”

To hate the thing that is completing you. To love the thing that is destroying you. What perfect suffering. What hell divine.

There’s no friend under heaven like an honest one.”

If you’re not being challenged, you’re not learning anything. If you’re the smartest man in the room, you’re in the wrong fucking room.

Hate is poison. Hope is salvation. And there’s still some things in this world worth saving.’

We only die if we are forgotten, Gabriel de León. Burn bright. Burn brief. But burn.’

I am nae woman. I am the wild. I am the wind.’

“I’d rather die for something that matters than live for nothing at all.

To live is to risk. To fear and to fail.

And that which makes us different, makes us mighty.”

“That there is nothing that grows as deep on this green earth, nothing that shines as bright in all the gables of heaven, nothing that burns as fierce in the blazing heart of hell, than a parent’s love for their child.”