L is for L is for Laini Taylor #AtoZChallenge

Posted April 14, 2022 in A-Z Challenge / 10 Comments

A-Z of Favourite Quotes
2022 Blogging from A to Z challenge badge

Today I’m continuing with the Blogging from A-Z Challenge! I’ll be posting every day except Sundays throughout April. This year, my readers voted for the theme “My Favourite Book Quotes”. So I’ve collected together the quotations that move me, inspire me and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them!

For letter L, I had lots of authors to choose from, including Lauren Oliver, Lauren James and Lauren DeStefano. But I had to go for Laini Taylor, my ultimate fantasy author. I fell in love with her imaginative, lyrical prose years ago when I read the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series. More recently, I’ve become obsessed with Strange the Dreamer. I highly recommend Taylor’s books for any lovers of fantasy fiction. I automatically buy anything she publishes before I’ve even read the blurb!

My Favourite Quotes by Laini Taylor

Daughter of smoke and bone by laini taylor book cover

“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil fell in love. It did not end well.”

“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.”

“Have you ever asked yourself, do monsters make war, or does war make monsters?”

“I don’t know many rules to live by,’ he’d said. ‘But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself. No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles–drug or tattoo–and…no inessential penises either.'”

“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.”

“She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.”

“‘Love is an element.'” An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.”

“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.”

“Like mold on books, grow myths on history.”

“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.”

“Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it’s too late?”

Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone
Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor

“A dream dirty and bruised is better than no dream at all.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Once upon a time, an angel and a devil held a wishbone between them. And its snap split the world in two.”

“Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate.”

“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, Days of Blood & Starlight

Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor book cover

“Wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, ‘My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”

“People with secrets shouldn’t make enemies. People with destinies shouldn’t make plans.”

“The 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.”

“I love vengeance like normal people love sunsets and long walks on the beach. I eat vengeance with a spoon like it’s honey. In fact, I may not even be a real person, but just a vow of vengeance made flesh.”

“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.”

“Anyone who takes on my sister,” he had postured once, all puffed-out bravado, “will have to deal with …my sister.” And then he’d dived behind her and cowered.

Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters
Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

“It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.”

“I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.”

“And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.”

“Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.”

“Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.”

“Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.”

“The library knows its own mind,” old Master Hyrrokkin told him, leading him back up the secret stairs. “When it steals a boy, we let it keep him.”

“As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths – intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard’s beard.”

“He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.”

“It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.”

“She was young and lovely and surprised and dead. She was also blue. Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring – not summer – sky.”

Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer
over to you

Have you read anything by Laini Taylor? Do you have a favourite quote by an author or from a book beginning with L? Let me know in the comments!

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10 responses to “L is for L is for Laini Taylor #AtoZChallenge

  1. Have I read anything by Laini Taylor?

    I have never heard of this author before reading this post, so no, I haven’t. I like the quote about the dragon looking behind him though. 🙂

  2. I’m driving through on the April A to Z roadtrip! This quote is so powerful — “Mercy, she had discovered, made mad alchemy: a drop of it could dilute a lake of hate.” I’ve never read any books by that author.

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