Days of Blood and Starlight (Daughter of Smoke and Bone, #2)

by Laini Taylor

Kaz made Zuzana wish that beauty were something that could be revoked for bad behavior.

Live in the world you’ve made, he thought to himself, rising each morning. You don’t deserve to rest.

I am priestess of a sandcastle in a land of dust and starlight.

“Sleep,” said Karou. “How cute. Do people still do that?”

Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.

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

There is intimacy in pain.

“Dead souls dream only of death,” the resurrectionist told the emperor. “Small dreams for small men. It is life that expands to fill worlds. Life is your master, or death is.

Sveva could only blink and feel that she’d hit the stony bottom of her own shallow depths.

How, with swords clenched in both hands, could one hope to keep blood from spilling?

These weren’t her folk, but . . . they were, and maybe that meant that anyone could be anyone’s, which was a sort of nice thing to think, with the world falling apart.

What can a soldier do when mercy is treason,

Live obscure, kill who you’re told, and die unsung.

“I don’t imagine nature spares us a thought except to weep when she sees us coming.”

They stepped off the road, and all lay before them.

Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate.

she’d never have believed she would stand when she could run.

Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.”

Karou had certainly learned that “possible” and “impossible” were rough categories at best.

but his smile, it was just wrong. Like he’d learned it from a book.

In their life it was not necessary to worry whether someone had been orphaned by slave raiders before you asked after their family.

Loriel said she was fine. She said it was nothing—just a man, and men wash off.

The scope of that glittering sky had a way of making her feel so small—minuscule, insignificant—and she realized she was relishing that feeling as a way of relieving herself of the pressure to do something.

“We are in this together.” They weren’t, though. It was clear now that they were in this very, very separately.

Nothing made you feel so useless as another person’s grief.

“Is it good or bad?” she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn’t help herself. “It’s both, sweet girl,” said Issa. “Like everything.”

He wondered what they had found over the curve of the horizon,

Dumb brute, couldn’t tell if he was being mocked. Always assume so, she wanted to tell him.

Heavy, heavy, keys to a shattered kingdom.

Brimstone knew better than anyone that death is not the end it sometimes seems.

Do the thing. Kill the monster. Change the world.

Karou had the idea that his last living thought was, This knife is too small to kill me. It wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter what happens to me, she told herself. 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.

“You make beautiful bruises,”

Oh, black fatigue. He just wanted to close his eyes.

He let the darkness have him, and there was a part of him that hoped it would decide to keep him.

“I’ve always wanted to be terrible.”

Everything for a price, and don’t forget to bargain.

“No,” he told Liraz, and reminded her it was bad luck to say good-bye. To which she replied, deadpan, “Bad luck? By all means, let’s not start having any of that.”

It was possibly the thinnest grounds for hope that he had ever heard of—we are alive and in the same world—

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