“A dream dirty and bruised is better than no dream at all.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“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.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love and dared to imagine a new way of living—one without massacres and torn throats and bonfires of the fallen, without revenants or bastard armies or children ripped from their mothers’ arms to take their turn in the killing and dying.
Once, the lovers lay entwined in the moon’s secret temple and dreamed of a world that was a like a jewel-box without a jewel—a paradise waiting for them to find it and fill it with their happiness.
This was not that world.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil held a wishbone between them.
And its snap split the world in two.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“It was brave," countered Issa. "It was rare. It was love, and it was beautiful.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Dead souls dream only of death. Small dreams for small men. It is life that expands to fill worlds. Life is your master, or death is”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“So," he called to her back, "Just out of curiosity, you know, purely conversation and all, at what age will you be entertaining offers of marriage?"
"You think it'll be so easy?" she called back over her shoulder. "No way. There will be tasks. Like in a fairy tale."
"Sounds dangerous."
"Very, so think twice."
"No need," he said. "You're worth it.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Nothing made you feel so useless as another person's grief.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Your heart is not wrong. Your heart is your strength. You don't have to be ashamed.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“As long as you're alive, there's always a chance things will get better."
"Or worse," said Liraz.
"Yes," he conceded. "Usually worse."
Hazael cut in. "My sister, Sunshine, and my brother, Light. You two should rally the ranks. You'll have us killing ourselves by morning.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Once upon a time, a girl lived in a sandcastle, making monsters to send through a hole in the sky.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Imagine if [Juliet] woke up and he was still alive, but..." She swallowed, waiting out a tremor in her voice. "But [Romeo] had killed her whole family. And burned her city. And killed and enslaved her people.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“You have only to begin, Lir. Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Daughter of my heart,' was the message Brimstone sent just for Karou. She wanted to cry again right here in the court, thinking of it. 'Twice-daughter, my joy. Your dream is my dream, and your name is true. You are all of our hope.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Be your own place of safety, she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife ticked in her boot - though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain - and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Once upon a time, the sky knew the weight of angel armies on the move, and the wind blew infernal with the fire of their wings.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Where am I and doing what?
You might well ask.
Freaky chick, you say?
You can't imagine.
I am priestess of a sandcastle
in a land of dust and starlight.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“It wasn't disgust she felt for Karou, not anymore; it was indignation. Incredulity. A man like Akiva crosses worlds to find you, infiltrates the enemy capital just to dance with you, bends heaven and hell to avenge your death, saves your comrade and kin from torture and death, and you send him off looking gut-punched, diminished, carved hollow?”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“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.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“It was interesting the way a small hate could grow inside a big hate and take it over.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“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.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“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.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“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.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“Let's just get this out of the way so I can relax. Karou, your friends aren't going to eat us, are they?"
No, Karou thought. They are not. She whispered back, "I don't think so. But try not to look delicious, okay?”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
“One world on its own is a strange enough seethe of coiling, unknowable veins of intention and chance, but two? Where two worlds mingle breath through rips in the sky, the strange becomes stranger, and many things may come to pass that few imaginations could encompass.”
― Laini Taylor, quote from Days of Blood & Starlight
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“You kill a man – that is so easy,’ Dr Hasselbacher said, ‘it needs no skill. You can be certain of what you’ve done, you can judge death, but to save a man – that takes more than six years of training, and in the end you can never be quite sure that it was you who saved him. Germs are killed by other germs. People just survive.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Our Man in Havana
“In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.”
― Liu Cixin, quote from The Three-Body Problem
“Dress yourself in heavy fishing waders, put on an overcoat and boxing gloves and a bucket over your head, then have somebody strap two sacks of cement across your shoulders and you will know what a space suit feels like under one gravity.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Have Space Suit—Will Travel
“Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting." by Primo Levi in Drowned”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved
“She was my dream; and if you touch a dream it vanishes, like a soap bubble.”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions
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