It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell.
Laini TaylorYou just mingled saliva with the most beautiful boy ever to tread the hallways of Saint Pock's. Saliva. There's DNA in saliva. You're like carrying his cells in your mouth like one of those weird frogs that incubates its eggs in its cheeks
Laini TaylorWhich 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 doesnโt need magic to be magical. (But a little bit sure doesn't hurt.)
Laini TaylorPerhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.
Laini TaylorIt's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.
Laini TaylorWhat are we fighting for? What are we killing for? What do you see when you look into the future?
Laini TaylorMusic. 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.
Laini TaylorSo violent. You want to mug and tase everybody these days." "I do," Zuzana agreed. "I swear I hate more poeple every day. Everyone annoys me. If I'm like this now, what am I going to be like when I'm old?" "You'll be the mean old biddy who fires a BB gun at kids from her balcony." "Nah. BBs just rile 'em up. More like a crossbow. Or a bazooka.
Laini TaylorLight 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 TaylorWith the infinite patience of one who has learned to live broken, he awaited her return.
Laini TaylorWhere 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 TaylorWe are the beginning ... We always have been. This time, let it be more than a beginning.
Laini TaylorI've always imagined that one day the path of your life would unroll at your feet and carry you away from us. As it should, as it must. But I am glad that day is not today.
Laini TaylorWas there another life she was meant to be living? At times she felt a keen certainty that there was โ a phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A sense would come over her while she was drawing or walking, and once while she was dancing slow and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be doing something else with her hands, with her legs, with her body. Something else. Something else. Something else.
Laini TaylorAnyway, since when are you shy? Just talk to him already!' ' 'And say what? Nice fiddling, handsome man?' 'Absolutely.
Laini TaylorOnce upon a time, an angel lay dying in the mist. And a devil knelt over him and smiled.
Laini TaylorI'm afraid they're in love," he said, concerned. "They don't want to leave you." He lifted one hand from her waist to gently brush a pair from her neck, where their wings fanned against her jaw. Melancholy, he said, "I know just how they feel.
Laini TaylorYeah? Okay," she said, staring up into the stars. "Let's see. You know how, at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet wakes up in the crypt and Romeo's already dead? He thought she was dead so he killed himself right next to her?" "Yeah. That was awesome." A pause, followed by "Ow," suggested elbow punctuation on the part of Mik. Karou ignored it. "Well, imagine if she woke up and he was still alive, but..." She swallowed, waiting out a tremor in her voice. "But he had killed her whole family. And burned her city. And killed and enslaved her people.
Laini TaylorBeautiful men and women with distorted shadows came and scorched their handprints onto doors before vanishing skyward, drafts of heat billowing behind them with the whumph of unseen wings. Here and there, feathers fell, and they were like tufts of white fire, disintegrating to ash as soon as they touched the ground.
Laini TaylorInfinities are not for casual exploration. You could fall and keep falling. You could get lost.
Laini TaylorI 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.
Laini TaylorKissing can ruin lives. Lips touch sometimes teeth clash. New hunger is born with a throb and caution falls away. A cursed girl with lips still moist from her first kiss might feel suddenly wild like a little monsoon. She might forget her curse just long enough to get careless and let it come true. She might kill everyone she loves.
Laini TaylorThe choice I mean is to protect our own innocents from the seraphim, instead of slaughtering theirs." "There are no innocent seraphim, said the wolf." "That's what they say when they kill our children.
Laini TaylorA thousand things might have stopped me from being here right now, but instead, a thousand things brought me here.
Laini TaylorI want to touch with my mouth. His mouth, with my mouth. Maybe his neck, too. But first things first: Make him aware I exist. Itโs possible that he is already aware, if only in a โdon't step on the small girlโ kind of way.
Laini TaylorHumanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves.
Laini TaylorBut her name was Esmรฉ. She was a girl with long, long, red, red hair. Her mother braided it. The flower shop boy stood behind her and held it in his hand. Her mother cut it off and hung it from a chandelier. She was Queen. Mazishta. Her hair was black and her handmaidens dressed it with pearls and silver pins. Her flesh was golden like the desert. Her flesh was pale like cream. Her eyes were blue. Brown.
Laini TaylorSkip meeting him? The butterflies, the pounding heart, the blushing? The part where you enter each other's magnetic fields for the first time, and it's like invisble lines of energy are drawing you together-
Laini TaylorBeing near her was like balancing on a tipping world, trying to keep your footing as the ground wanted to roll you forward, hurl you into a spiral from which there was no recovery, only impact, and it was a longed-for impact, a sweet and beckoning collision.
Laini TaylorIt seemed she was in a cathedralโif, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.
Laini TaylorWhat a lovely display of personhood. He's like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I'm fun but smart. You won't be able to put me down.
Laini TaylorKarou saw them with her human eyes, this army she had rendered more monstrous than ever nature had, and she knew what the world would see in them if they flew to fight the Dominion: demons, nightmares, evil. The sight of the seraphim would be heralded as a miracle. But chimaera? The apocalypse.
Laini TaylorIf he does he's a fool," said Hazael. "The message is clear. Please enjoy this lovely fruit while contemplating all the ways we might kill you in your sleep.
Laini TaylorThe two of them were stoic and stone-faced and ten feet apart, currently not even looking at each other, but Zuzana had the impression of a pair of magnets pretending not to be magnets. Which, you know, only works until it doesn't.
Laini TaylorBe an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. Itโs who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them, then make them better. Find the way. No one will make this dream come true for you but you.
Laini Taylor