Laini Taylor

“Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.”

“El Amor es un Elemento. --- Akiva”

“She could smell the boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her -- like butter before you add sugar, in the first steps of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm. It was hypnotic. Heady. And she wanted more.”

“This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It's a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings.”

“Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts.In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.”

“Will you take some refreshment?" His lip pulled into a snarl. Unable to contain himself, he added, "One last cup of tea before you burn, you old bitch?”

“Oh, Hell. Must. Mate. Immediately.”

“It didn't escape Karou's notice that he found subtle ways of touching her.”

“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.”

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

“Karou was mysterious. She had no apparent family, she never talked about herself, and she was expert at evading questions--for all that her friends knew of her background, she might have sprung whole from the head of Zeus. And she was endlessly surprising. Her pockets were always spilling out curious things: ancient bronze coins, teeth, tiny jade tigers no bigger than her thumbnail. She might reveal, while haggling for sunglasses with an African street vendor, that she spoke fluent Yoruba. Once, Kaz had undressed her to discover a knife hidden in her boot. There was the matter of her being impossible to scare and, of course, there were the scars on her abdomen: three shiny divots that could only have been made by bullets.”

“Did you know that mako shark fetuses eat each other in the womb?... Its true. Only cannibal fetuses survive to be born. Can you imagine if people were like that?”

“The thing he wished for most was a thing he had never wished for at all, not until he had discovered her. And it came true that night, and many nights after. A brief and shining span of happiness, it was the pivot point around which his whole life spun.”

“Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.”

“He's such a gargantuan asshole.A giant, stupid orifice.A walking, talking cranny.”

“No, tiny violent one.”

“She didn't need a Taser; she was more than capable of defending herself without electricity. She'd had an unusual education.”

“Alas. I am not an option.”

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

“She had fallen in love with him twice. She loved him now with both loves, so overpowering it was almost unbearable.”

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

“Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat?”

“This gown, is it cut from shadow?" the general asked. "I can barely feel it between my fingers."Not for want of trying, thought Madrigal."Perhaps it is a reflection of the night sky," he suggested, "skimmed from a pond?"She supposed that he was being poetic. erotic, even. In return, as unerotically as possible- more like complaining of a stain that wouldn't come out-she said, "Yes, my lord. I went for a dip, and the reflection clung.”

“It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.”

“It was as if she had emitted a pulse of radiation that reached him even where he stood, and it bathed him and it burned him.”

“She looked at him, beautiful Kazimir whose smile used to work on her like a summons, compelling her to his side.”

“Nunca te arrepientas de tu propia bondad, pequeña. Mantener la sinceridad frente al mal es una muestra de fuerza. -Brimstone”

“Qué infantil resultaba, considerando dónde se encontrabaahora, haber creído que existía un propósito divino en su amor.Y aun así, qué hermoso había sido. Lo que había compartidocon Akiva no podía arrebatárselo la vergüenza.”

“Me temo que se han enamorado —dijo él, preocupado—. No quieren abandonarte (...)Sé exactamente cómo se sienten.”

“Akiva supo que ella era su álef, su verdad y su comienzo. Su alma.”

“So 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.”

“¡Míralo! Me temo que vas a echar a arder como siga mirándote de ese modo con esos ojazos naranjas.”

“An idea fell like a seed and over the next weeks it went on growing like a fig vine lush and conquering twining round her old beliefs and covering them in new growth until they were as invisible as a tiger in a thicket and just as deadly.”

“James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once he might have believed it to be the work of Providence but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance.”

“Kizzy was so busy wishing she was Sarah Ferris or Jenny Glass that she could scarcely see herself at all and she was certainly blind to her own weird beauty: her heavy spell-casting eyes too-wide mouth wild hair and hips that could be wild too if they learned how. No one else in town looked anything like her and if she lived to womanhood she was the one artists would want to draw not the Sarahs and Jennys. She was the one who would some day know a dozen ways to wear a silk scarf how to read the sky for rain and coax feral animals near how to purr throaty love songs in Portuguese and Basque how to lay a vampire to rest how to light a cigar how to light a man's imagination on fire.”

“You 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”

“¿Hola? ¿Quién está ahí? Que se vuelva a poner Zuzana.¿Zuzana? Hay una tía ñoña al teléfono haciéndose pasar por ti…”

“Kissing 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...”

“It was Kizzy's first kiss and maybe it was her last and it was delicious.”

“It gave her a creeping sense of impending aloneness, like she was some orphaned animal raised by do-gooders, soon to be released into the wild. She didn't want to be released into the wild. She wanted to be held dear.”

“Te has preguntado alguna vez si son los monstruos los que provocan la guerra, o si es la guerra la que genera monstruos”

“Anhelar el amor la hacía sentir como un gato que siempre se enrosca en los tobillos maullando acaríciame, acaríciame, mírame,quiéreme.Preferiría ser el gato que observa todo con descaro desde lo alto de una pared, con expresión inescrutable. El gato que evita las caricias, que no las necesita. ¿Por qué no ser ese gato?”

“It was hard to imagine feeling that magical tingling sensation in the pit of her belly anytime soon. Best not to worry about it, she thought. She didn't need it. Well. She didn't want to need it. Yearning for love made her feel like a cat that was always twining around ankles, meowing Pet me, pet me, look at me, love me. Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat? Be that cat!!! she wrote, drawing it into the corner of her page, cool and aloof.”

“No metas en tu cuerpo cosas innecesarias. Nada de venenos ni productos químicos, tampoco gases, tabaco o alcohol, ningún objeto afilado ni agujas prescindibles (drogas o tatuajes) y, por supuesto…, ningún pene innecesario.-Brimstone”

“In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint....Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire.”

“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.”

“This new thing between them it was... Astral. It reshaped the air, and it was in her, too—a warming and softening, a pull—and for that moment, her hands in his, Karou felt as powerless as starlight tugged toward the sun in the huge, strange warp of space.”

“Never repent of your own goodness, child. To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.”

“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.”