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.

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.

— Laini Taylor

He didn't believe in magic and demons. He believed in day and night, endurance and fury, cold mud and loneliness and the speed with which blood leaves the body

— Laini Taylor

He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some motherland of story. Demons and wing smiths, seraphic and spirits, he loves it all.

— Laini Taylor

He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.

— Laini Taylor

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all.

— Laini Taylor

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

— Laini Taylor

His eyes are blue, and blue eyes up close are a celestial phenomenon: nebulae as seen through telescopes, the light of unnamed stars diffused through dusts and elements and endlessness. Layers of light. Blue eyes are starlight.

— Laini Taylor

His hope was like an intake of icy air—it hurt—and just as sharp and sudden was his jealousy. In an instant he was hot and cold with it, his hands clenching into fists so tight they burned. A flare of adrenaline coursed through him and left him shaking, and it wasn’t her. It wasn’t her, and for the fleeting flash of an instant, he felt relief. Followed by crushing disappointment and self-loathing for what his reaction had been.

— Laini Taylor