Laini Taylor
She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.Collection: Sphinx
Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Hope
A thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here.Collection: Might
She knocked and waited, because when the door was opened from within, it had the potential to lead someplace quite different.Collection: Doors
Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.Collection: Magic
The audacity to love. Do you know what a gift that is?Collection: Audacity
Music. Close your eyes and it's a rosebush blooming in time lapse so that it shoots and blossoms flow outward in a swift choreography of growth and collapse, twine and coil, release and fade. Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.Collection: Eye
I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books.Collection: Beautiful
It's all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.Collection: Quilts
Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.Collection: Belief
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.Collection: Life
There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it's hurtling forward-toward what?Collection: Past
Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters?Collection: War
She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox’s tongue. She tastes like hope.Collection: Stars
She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.Collection: Rain
It’s like losing gravity and falling into space – the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Moving
Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.Collection: Angel
Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.Collection: Angel
I know it's not easy for you, living this life, but try to remember, always try to remember, you're not the only one with troubles.Collection: Remember You
It’s not stalking if you don't follow them home, right?Collection: Home
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry 'Monster!' and looked behind him.Collection: Dragons
Hazael rose from his knees. It had to take extraordinary effort, yet somehow he managed a version of his lazy smile when he said, "You know, I've always wanted to be a bath attendant. You should take me instead. I'm nicer than my sister." Jael returned the lazy smile. "You're not my type." "Well, you're not anybody's type," said Hazael. "No, wait. I take it back. My sword says she'd like to know you better." "I'm afraid I must deny her the pleasure. I've been kissed by swords before, you see." "I may have noticed.Collection: Rose
Once upon a time, an angel lay dying in the mist. And a devil knelt over him and smiled.Collection: Angel
Like mold on books, grow myths on history.Collection: Book
It's not like there's a law against flying." "Yes there is. The law of gravity.Collection: Law
She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil's lair. She wasn't innocent now, but she didn't know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing.Collection: Girl
Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.Collection: Children
We only get to be one person; we don't even get to choose that person. By the time we get ahold of ourselves, we are pieces already in play.Collection: Play
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve—like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.Collection: Loneliness
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.Collection: Daughter
Ziri's soul felt like the high roaming wind of the Adelphas Mountains and the beat of stormhunters' wings, like the beautiful, mournful, eternal song of the wind flutes that had filled their caves with music he could not possibly remember. It felt like home.Collection: Beautiful
If it's not chocolate, it's not breakfast.Collection: Chocolate
Jael returned the lazy smile. "You're not my type." "Well, you're not anybody's type," said Hazael. "No, wait. I take it back. My sword says she'd like to know you better.Collection: Waiting
But Hazael only said, "I brought you a present." Liraz took the flower, looked at it, and then a Hazael, expressionless. And then she ate it. She chewed the flower and swallowed it. "Hmm," said Hazael. "Not the usual response." "Oh, do you give flowers often?" "Yes," he said. He probably did. Hazael had a way of enjoying life in spite of the many restrictions they lived under, being soldiers, and worse, being Misbegotten. "I hope it wasn't poisonous," he said lightly. Liraz just shrugged. "There are worse ways to die.Collection: Flower
"Death," said Akiva. His life was leaving him fast now that he no longer held his wound. His eyes just wanted to drift closed. "I'm ready." "Well, I'm not. I hear it's dull, being dead." She said it lightly, amused, and he peered up at her. Had she just made a joke? She smiled. Smiled. He did, too. Amazed, he felt it happening, as if her smile had triggered a reflex in him. "Dull sounds nice," he said, letting his eyes flutter closed. "Maybe I can catch up on my reading."Collection: Nice
She tasted of fairytalesCollection: Fairytale
A pause came between them, and it was so full of Akiva that Karou imagined she could smell him.Collection: Smell
I know. Life is so unfair. I'm still not going to pee on Karou's ex-boyfriend for you." "What? I wasn't even going to ask you to." In her most reasonable tone, Zuzana explained explained, "I just want you to pee in a balloon so I can drop it on him.Collection: Ex Boyfriend
You could look out the window today, see the sky raining fire, and say that it has all been for nothing, everything we've ever done, because now we've lost. But folk were born and lived and knew friendship and music in this city, ugly as it is, and all across this land that we fought for. Some grew old, and others were less lucky. Many bore children and raised them, and had the pleasure of making them, too, and we gave them that for as long as we could. Who has ever done more, my friend?Collection: Children
The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls. Like Kizzy.Collection: Girl
...and she felt the words come from some iron place within her that hadn't existed an hour ago. She didn't speak loudly, but there was such a change in her voice. Coming from that iron place, it was heavy and true; it wasn't persuasive, or desperate, or antagonistic. It just was.Collection: Voice
A wave of weariness took him. How could life be so unrelentingly ugly?Collection: Ugly
It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell.Collection: Her Smile
I will give them nightmares to haunt their dreams long after I'm gone.Collection: Dream
Don't I deserve to finally be free of you?Collection: Deserve
I'm going to be the scariest grandma in the world.Collection: Grandma
Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.Collection: Girl
We dreamed together of the world remade.Collection: Together