Quotes from Laini Taylor

Anyone who would wear all white like that clearly had issues. Just looking at him made her wish she had a paintball gun, but hell, you couldn't pack for every eventuality.

He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.

I will do just as you wish,' said no cat ever.

It's the mind. It's the most complex and astonishing thing there is, that there's a world inside each of us that no one else can ever know or see or visit.

It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over.

Anyone who takes on my sister," he had postured once, all puffed-out bravado, "will have to deal with ...my sister." And then he'd dived behind her and cowered.

By contrast, the grime of her journey, the outré inappropriateness of the state of her, it felt like armor. I earned this dirt. Respect. The dirt.

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.

What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?

Liraz was special. Specially antisocial. Spectacularly, even.

It didn't escape Karou's notice that he found subtle ways of touching her.

I would have chosen you, if they had let me choose.

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.

It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell.

I said I was sorry." "Be sorry, then. Just be sorry somewhere else.

It was one of those dreams that invade the space between seconds, proving sleep has its own physics- where time shrinks and swells, lifetimes unspool in a blink, and cities burn to ash in a mere flutter of lashes.

Which is what one always hopes will happen: for life to take over and be bigger and more marvelous than what we can dream up on our own. Life doesn't need magic to be magical. (But a little bit sure doesn't hurt.)

We are the beginning ... We always have been. This time, let it be more than a beginning.

She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original—one emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn't love… and it wasn't hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling. It was shame. Shame never faded.

The worst moment of one's life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.

He dropped the pretense, and dropped his head, so his brow came to rest against the sun-warmed top of hers. His arms went around her and drew her in, and Karou and Akiva were like two matches struck against each other to flare starlight. With a sigh, she softened, and it was pure homecoming to melt against him and rest.

Take up a weapon and you become an instrument with as pure a purpose as the weapon itself: to find arteries and open them, limbs and sever them; to take what is alive and deliver it unto death.

She knocked and waited, because when the door was opened from within, it had the potential to lead someplace quite different.

Light coursed through Karou and darkness chased it-burning through her, chilling her, shimmer and shadow, ice and fire, blood and starlight, rushing, roaring, filling her.