His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile.

— Laini Taylor

His shadow splayed out huge before him, and his mind gleamed with ancient wars and winged beings, a mountain of melted demon bones and the city on the far side of it--a city that had vanished in the mists of time.

— Laini Taylor

Home. The word always had air quotes around it in her mind. She'd done what she could to make her flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur. And of course there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall. But there was no help for the real emptiness; its close air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she was alone, the empty place within her, the willingness, as she thought of it, seemed to swell. Even being with KAZ had done something to keep it at bay, though not enough. Never enough.

— Laini Taylor

Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there's no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

— Laini Taylor

Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short, and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.

— Laini Taylor

I am a link in a chain

— Laini Taylor

I can't imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she'd been right, but Lira thought that she would now, She would apologize for Sabbath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn't reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and might-if she weren't Lira, and it weren't unthinkable-have been sobbing. In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and here's where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true.

— Laini Taylor

I don’t believe in prayer, but I do believe in magic, and I want to believe in miracles.

— Laini Taylor

I feel liquefied, like a cucumber forgotten in the crisper drawer, and I want to hold myself at arm's length and carry me to the trash. Who is this sack of slush masquerading as me? It's intolerable.

— Laini Taylor

If only it were that easy to let go of hate. Just relax your face.

— Laini Taylor