Laini Taylor

Beautiful 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.

Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one's soul so entangled in it that you can't let it go, even if you try. If you feel it--if you really feel it--then you speak it like it's a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there's blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can't let go.

The dead," she said. "And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you'd think they were corpses handing on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements." ... "they're gone, they can't be hurt anymore, but we drag their memory around with us, doing our worst in their name, like it's what they'd want, for us to avenge them?

Be 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. It's 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.

Liraz snorted, caught off guard, and the tension between them ebbed away. "I'm sorry of my almost dying interrupted your almost kissing.

He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.

I want to be the guy in a movie who's, I don't know, out walking his rabbit on a leash (I don't have a rabbit) and knows exactly how to strike up a quirky, compelling conversation. Though maybe if you're walking a rabbit on a leash, you don't even have to speak; the rabbit does the work for you. Not that Zuzana seems like the rabbity type. Maybe if I were walking a fox on a leash. Or a hyena. Yeah, if I had a hyena, I'd probably never have to start a conversation again.Except for, "Sorry my hyena ate your leg.

She wanted to be free, and if she could never be free, at least she wanted to be brave - brave enough not to sell herself, no matter what the payment, or the cost of refusing.

As for Ellai, she told her sister what had passed, and Nitid wept, and her tears fell to earth and became chimaera, children of regret...

It was the only lullaby she would ever sing, and it was sung in Hell.

I want to touch with my mouth. His mouth, with my mouth. Maybe his neck, too. But first things first: Make him aware I exist.It__ possible that he is already aware, if only in a __on't step on the small girl_ kind of way.

It__ 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.

In a dark layer of Esme's memory there was a kiss. Vividly she recalled Mihai in the snow, naked and fanged. That kiss had conjured ancient passions a god had tried to erase, and Esme remembered the pressure of it and even knew the flavor of that black river. But it belonged to someone else. Tom's kiss, by contrast, wasn't passionate.Esme didn't even have time to close her eyes and tilt her face up to meet it, and it landed crooked and only half on her lips. It was clumsy and it ended quickly. And it was hers.

He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.

...looking up at the stars, he had accepted life as a medium for action. Something to wield like a tool. One__ own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.

[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original__ne emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn__ love_ and it wasn__ hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling.It was shame. Shame never faded.

I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write.

When they had hurried to the train station with their violin cases, they had drawn almost as many stares as they would on any normal day when their hair was to their knees and sheeting behind them like red silk. A poetic fruit-seller had told them once that they looked like dryads, and they did still, only now they looked like dryads who had tired of snagging their hair on brambles and sliced it all off on the edge of a knife.