Sasha > Sasha's Quotes

“And I do. I do wonder, I think about it all the time. What it would be like to kill myself. Because I never really know, I still can't tell the difference, I'm never quite certain whether or not I'm actually alive. I sit here every single day. Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you're a blur that blends into the background.

Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and you run.

Run run run until you can't hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.

Run until you drop dead. Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.

Run, I said.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

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

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

“You really think joy is easier to come by than pain? What have you had more of?”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“Once upon a time, there was only darkness, and there were monsters vast as worlds who swam in it. They were the Gibborium, and they loved the darkness because it concealed their hideousness. Whenever some other creature contrived to make light, they would extinguish it. When stars were born, they swallowed them, and it seemed that darkness would be eternal.

But a race of bright warriors heard of the Gibborium and traveled from their far world to do battle with them. The war was long, light against dark, and many warriors were slain. In the end, when they vanquished the monsters, there were a hundred left alive, and these hundred were the godstars, who brought light to the universe.

They made the rest of the stars, including our sun, and there was no more darkness, only endless light. They made children in their image- seraphim - and sent them down to beat light to the worlds that spun in space, and all was good. But one day, the last of the Gibborium, who was called Zamzumin, persuaded them that shadows were needed, that they would make the light seem brighter by contrast, and so the godstars brought shadows into being.

But Zamzumin was a trickster. He needed only a shred of darkness to work with. He breathed life into the shadows, and as the godstars had made the seraphim in their own image, so did Zamzumin make the chimaera in his, and so they were hideous, and forever after the seraphim would fight on the side of light, and the chimaera for dark, and they would be enemies until the end of the world.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“The worst moment of one's life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“...I crave a shawl."

He was tense with anger but his hands remained gentle at her waist. He said, "I can make you a shawl."

She cocked her head. "You knit? Well. That's an unusual accomplishment in a soldier.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“Zuzana arched an eyebrow. She was a master of the eyebrow arch, and Karou envied her for it. Her own eyebrows did not function independently of each other, which handicapped her expressions of suspicion and disdain.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“This new thing between them it was... Astral. It reshaped the air, and it was in her, too—a warming and softening, a pull—and for that moment, her hands in his, Karou felt as powerless as starlight tugged toward the sun in the huge, strange warp of space.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“It was the only lullaby she would ever sing, and it was sung in Hell.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“...wings—-vast shimmering wings, their reach so great they swept the walls on either side of the alley, each feather like the wind-tugged lick of a candle flame.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“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

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

“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

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

“Kissing can ruin lives. Lips touch sometimes teeth clash. New hunger is born with a throb and caution falls away. A cursed girl with lips still moist from her first kiss might feel suddenly wild like a little monsoon. She might forget her curse just long enough to get careless and let it come true. She might kill everyone she loves...”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“Heavily and hypnotically,with her soul flattening itself back like the ears of a hissing cat,Kizzy leaned in and drank of Jack Husk's full,moist mouth,and his red,red lips were hungry against hers,drinking her in return.Their eyes closed.Fingers clutched at collars and hair,at the picnic blanket,at the grass.And as they sank down,pinning their shadows beneath them,the horizon tipped on its side,and slowly,thickly,hour by hour,the day spilled out and ebbed away.

It was Kizzy's first kiss, and maybe it was her last, and it was delicious.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something -- some new skeleton -- was emerging from beneath the softness of her accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“That boy could wear a banana leaf and a propeller beanie and look beautiful."
"That how you like your boys, Kiz?" asked Cactus.
"Oh yes. All my boys. I'll issue him a banana leaf and a propeller beanie at once and induct him into my boy-harem."
Evie snorted. "Boy harem! Imagine - their little propellers all spinning as they fan you with palm fronds."
"While they satisfy my every whim," added Cactus. Kizzy snorted.
"Forget it. I don't lend out my boys."
"Come on, no one likes a greedy slave owner."
"My boys aren't slaves! They stay because they want to. I give them all the elk meat they can eat. And Xbox, you know, to keep their thumbs nice and agile.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“She could smell the boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her -- like butter before you add sugar, in the first steps of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady. And she wanted more.”
― Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

“Then there were things-- epic, terrible things-- that he didn't tell her but skirted around, like caressing the edges of a wound, hesitant, testing for pain.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“It was as if she had emitted a pulse of radiation that reached him even where he stood, and it bathed him and it burned him.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“Once upon a time, before chimaera and seraphim, there was the sun and the moons. The sun was betrothed to Nitid, the bright sister, but it was demure Ellai, always hiding behind her bold sister, who stirred his lust. He contrived upon her bathing in the sea and he took her. She struggled, but he was the sun, and he thought he should have what he wanted. Ellai stabbed him and escaped, and the blood of the sun flew like sparks to earth, where it became seraphim- misbegotten children of fire. And like their father, they believed it their due to want, and take, and have.

As for Ellai, she told her sister what had passed, and Nitid wept, and her tears fell to earth and became chimeara, children of regret.

When the sun came again to the sisters, neither would have him. Nitid put Ellai behind her and protected her, though the sun, still bleeding sparks, knew Ellai was not as defenseless as she seemed. He plead with Nitid to forgive him but she refused, and to this day he follows the sisters across the sky, wanting and wanting and never having, and that will be his punishment, forever.

Nitid is the goddess of tears and life, hunts and war, and her temples are too many to count. It is she who fills wombs, slows the hearts of the dying, and leads her children against the serephim. Her light is like a small sun; she chases away shadows.

Ellai is more subtle. She is a trace, a phantom moon, and there are only a handful of nights she alone takes the sky. There are called Ellai nights, and they are dark and star-scattered and good for furtive things. Ellai is the goddes of assassins and secret lovers. Temples to her are few, and hidden, like the one in the requiem grove in the hills above Loramendi.”
― Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone

“My life is four walls of missed opportunities poured in concrete molds.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

“I am nothing more than the consequence of catastrophe.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

“I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.”
― Tahereh Mafi

“One word, two lips, three four five fingers form a fist.
One corner, two parents, three four five reasons to hide.
One child, two eyes, three four seventeen years of fear.
A broken broomstick, a pair of wile faces, angry whispers, locks on my door.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me