Dreams of Gods and Monsters (Daughter of Smoke and Bone, #3)

by Laini Taylor

It was a rule of secret-keeping, in which she was well-versed: Ask not, lest ye be asked.

“I’m starting to question our choice of life skills,” she whispered to him. “I know. Why aren’t we samurai?” “Let’s be samurai,” she said.

Everything,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Everything is going on.”

And that she could live with, but dear gods and stardust, Akiva was another matter.

“Hey, there’s more to life than terrifying your enemies,”

“We have so many enemies, Lisseth,” said Karou, keeping her voice light. “Most of them are our birthright, inherited like a duty, but the ones we make for ourselves are special. We should choose them with care.”

If it had been flesh, one would say it was bruised. This dawn, like the others,

What power could bruise the sky?

Soldiers and children do as they’re told.” A curl of her lip, surveying the lot of them, and she said, “Children grow out of it, but soldiers just die.”

“There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other.

It was unreal how two souls could look out through the same set of eyes in such drastically different fashion, seeming to reshape them entirely.

So much to rue, but to what end? All unlived lives cancel one another out. She had nothing but now.

It was hope, dying unsurprised.

“You wouldn’t want to sleep through this, love. These are extraordinary times.”

Of such petty victories is a day made sweet.

“And strangely fold the hours as the end draws near.”

Akiva’s eyes were heat and light, and she wanted to stay there forever. Tomorrow, the apocalypse. Tonight, the sun.

That someday he could feel that he’d done more good than evil, and that by living he hadn’t brought his world lower than if he’d never been. Was that atonement, the tilt of the scales at the end of life?

How do you just thrust “I love you” out into the air? It needs waiting arms to catch it.

There could be life, around the edges.

People with destinies shouldn’t make plans.

Dread had walked down the hill with her.

it felt like a carnival menagerie where all the exhibits were dead.

a dynasty of hurt.

He wished it for her, though—that Liraz might find herself, someday, preoccupied by bliss.

“My wife likes to say that the mind is a palace with room for many guests.

Life is only a thread tethering soul to body, and once you know how to find it, it is as easily plucked as a flower.

How seldom it happened, in a long-standing war of hatred, that one side said, “Enough. I deserved that. Let it end here.”

How could it have taken her so many years to feel the preciousness of life?

Maybe there was an intention. A plan, a fate. And maybe it hated them.

Her mind was circling back to it yet again—another rotation on the shame carousel—when

but wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, “My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief.

This wasn’t a time for falling in love.

know that I will carry the memory of you with me through every veil, into the darkness of every tomorrow, and beyond the shadow of every horizon.

Infinities are not for casual exploration.

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.

Villain and victim both, she thought,

“Come now. I know you’re not the little doll you look like. Life is choices, and only fools choose their allies with their heart.”

where medieval nudged up against Renaissance on the bones of ancient.

hope, pride, and dreams, sent back where they came from,

Absence has presence, sometimes,

a woman in full command of her power, unbowed and unbroken, and that was a dangerous thing.

and their relief was a shared country,

What was more fantastical than a dull day?

Liraz spoke, and truth was born.

He’d fallen in love like it was a hobby—and out of it the same way.

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

I know that my beloved daughter was a concubine in the harem of a warmonger who tore half a world apart.

It was an ending overlapped by a beginning,

Maybe heart-crushing love was the same, and could only grow in hostile environments.