"Who on earth could feel comfortable enough to sleep in a room with no books?"
-My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand

"She considered writing to him now asking him if he too had felt like this, as thought he had been shut away somewhere and was trapped in a place where there was nothing.  It was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again.  She did not know what she was going to do."
-Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

"Eilis slipped away, glad no one had noticed that she had not spoken once at the meal.  She wondered if she could go out now, do anything rather than face her tomb of a bedroom and all the thoughts that would come when she lay awake and all the thoughts that would come when she slept.  She stood in the hall, and then turned upstairs, realizing that she was afraid too of the outside, and even if she were not she would have no idea where to go at this time of the evening.  She hated this house, she thought, its smells, its noises, its colors.  She was already crying as she went up the stairs.  She knew that as long as the others were discussing their wardrobes in the kitchen below, she would be able to cry as loudly as she pleased without their hearing her."
-Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

"She was nobody here.  It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor.  Nothing meant anything.  The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there.  In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar.  Nothing here was part of her.  It was false, empty, she thought.  She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing.  Not the slightest thing.  Not even Sunday.  Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep.  In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o'clock.  There was nothing she could do.  It was as though she had been locked away."
-Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

"There was, she thought, enough sadness in the house, maybe even more than she realized.  She would try as best she could not to add to it.  Her mother and Rose could not be fooled, she was sure, but there seemed to her an even greater reason why there should be no tears before her departure.  They would not be needed.  What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling."
-Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

"Until now, Eilis had always presumed that she would live in the town all her life, as her mother had done, knowing everyone, having the same friends and neighbors, the same routines in the same streets.  She had expected that she would find a job in the town, and then marry someone and give up the job and have children.  Now, she felt that she was being singled out for something for which she was not in any way prepared, and this, despite the fear it carried with it, gave her a feeling, or more a set of feelings, she thought she might experience in the days before her wedding, days in which everyone looked at her in the rush of arrangements with light in their eyes, days in which she herself was fizzy with excitement but careful not to think too precisely about what the next few weeks would be like in case she lost her nerve."
-Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

"The saddest realization I've had in my life is that my parents are people.  Sad, human people.  I aged a decade in that moment."
-The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer

"'We can't ever be together,' he finished.  'But I always want to know you, even if we're in the same room and you're just saying hi to me over and over again, I'll be perfectly happy.  I'll always want to be sitting across from you.'"
-More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

"If you can bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you don't bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth can destroy you."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.  What a miracle is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.  Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave.  They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.  They are full of all the things that you don't get in real life - wonderful, lyrical language, for instance, right off the bat.  And quality of attention: we may notice amazing details during the course of a day but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention.  An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.  My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.  Aren't you? I ask."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Writing can give you what having a baby can give you:  it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it."
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"Adults lie.  They lie about how they love children equally.  They never do.  They love children differently, and the difference is so broad that equality is not even in the picture."
-A World Without You by Beth Revis

"I'm good at science because I'm good at listening.  I have been told I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded.  I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that I can't do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman.  I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death.  I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine.  I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous.  But I was told all of these things by people who can't understand the present or see the future any better than I can.  Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, anybody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along.  I don't take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it.  When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences:  You shouldn't take this job too seriously.  Except for when you should."
-Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

"But it wasn't anything like the fear that accompanied my drowning nightmare - harrowing and visceral.  No, this fear made me feel fizzy.  Hopeful. 

In fact, this fear felt like waking up to discover I am still here."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"That I might always be a little bit vicious or restless.  That I might crave peace, but never a cage of comfort."
-A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas

"'Tell you what,' said Victor.  'You remember me, and I'll remember you, and that way we won't be forgotten.'"
-Vicious by V.E. Schwab

"Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human."
-Vicious by V.E. Schwab

"It had taken all his control to hide the anger, the desire to pen over Eli's life, and rewrite it into his."
-Vicious by V.E. Schwab

"Victor wondered about lots of things.  He wondered about himself (whether he was broken, or special, or better, or worse) and about other people (whether they were all really as stupid as they seemed).  He wondered about Angie - what would happen if he told her how he felt, what it would be like if she chose him.  He wondered about life, and people, and science, and magic, and God, and whether he believed in any of them." 
-Vicious by V. E. Schwab  

"He meets me where I am, and because of the downward tilt of the driveway, we are toe to toe, nose to nose.  'Willowdean Opal Dickson, you are beautiful.  Fuck anyone who's ever made you feel anything less.'  His chest heaves.  'When I close my eyes, I see you.  I can talk to you.  In a way I never have with anyone else.'

Beautiful, he says.  Fat, I think.  But can't I be both at the same time?
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"'Why?'  I drop my bag in the driveway.  'Why do you want to be with this?'  I wave my arm up and down the length of my body.  Immediately, I hate myself for this.  The only person making this about my body is me." 
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"I expected to hear from Mitch yesterday.  A follow-up call of some sort to make sure we were cool after Halloween.  Or maybe, like, a customer service call to rate my satisfaction.  But nothing." 
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"I get what he means, because I think I've played pretend my whole life.  I don't know when, but a really long time ago, I decided who I wanted to be.  And I've been acting like her - whoever she is - since.  But I think the act is fading, and I don't know if I like the person I am beneath it all.  I wish there were some kind of magic words that could bridge the gap between the person I am and the one I wish I could be.  Because the whole fake it till you make it thing?  It's not working for me." 
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"No matter how much I tell myself that the fat and the stretch marks don't matter, they do.  Even if Bo, for whatever reason, doesn't care, I do.

Then there are days when I really give zero flying fucks, and I am totally satisfied with this body of mine.  How can I be both of those people at once?"
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"It's not that I feel unworthy.  I deserve my happy ending.  But what if, for me, Bo is a high point and, for him, I'm a lapse in judgement?"
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"Because for the first time in my life, I fit.  I fit without any question."
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"My stomach starts to burn.  Crushes are so stupidly physical sometimes, like colds."
-Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

"(So this is how it happens.  This is how girls change for boys.  I am simultaneously annoyed at myself and mildly amazed that I have the ability.)"
-Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

"He turned towards me, a familiar face but in a really unfamiliar way, his green eyes locked on me.  He moved his head closer to mine, and it felt so right that I'd already close my eyes."
-Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

"I felt him subtly glance me up and down, quick and fluttery like a moth, as if I was some random girl walking by him on the street and we hadn't been best friends for almost seven years.  It gave me a little shiver.  In a good way, I realized."
-Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

"I think maybe the most frustrating feeling in the world is to have something to say but not know how to put it into words.  To have lived through something but not be able to get it out of you before it festers." 
-The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

"I had the strangest feeling - like I had lost something without ever really having it in the first place - that I wasn't what I once was, and wasn't at all what I was meant to be.  The sensation made me feel hollow down to my bones."
-The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

"I said her name. 

I recited 'Lovesong', a poem I like a great deal but she never though much of.  I apologised for reading it and told myself not to worry.

The ashes stirred and seemed eager so I tilted the thin and I yelled into the wind

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU

and up they went, the sense of a cloud, the failure of clouds, scientifically quick and visually hopeless, a murder of little burnt birds flecked against the grey sky, the grey sea, the white sun, and gone.  And the boys were behind me, a tide-wall of laughter and yelling, hugging my legs, tripping and grabbing, leaping, spinning, stumbling, roaring, shrieking and the boys shouted

I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU

and their voice was the life and song of their mother. 
Unfinished.  Beautiful.  Everything."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Connoisseurs, they were, of how to miss a mother."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"This is what we know of Dad.  He was a
quiet boy.  He drifted off on family walks,
he doodled and drew and his feelings were
easily hurt by rough kids at school.  He
didn't have a head for sums.  He spent the
first twenty years of his life reading books,
being not-bad-but-not-skilled at football
and waiting for Mum.  He loved the Greek
myths and Russians and Joyce.  He was
waiting to be our Dad.

And then our Mum and Dad were in love
and they were truly dry-stone strong and
durable and people speak of ease and joy
and spontaneity and the fact that their two
smells became one smell, our smell.  Us.

Afterwards he was quieter.  He was, for two
or three years, by all accounts, very odd.
He had the perpetual look and demeanour
of someone floating, turning in the beer-
gold light of evening and being surprised
by the enduring warmth.  A rolled-over
shoulder half-squint half-smile.  Caught
baffled by the perplexing slow-release of
sadness for ever and ever and ever.  Which
I suppose, looking back, was because of us.
He couldn't rage.  He couldn't want to die.
He couldn't rail against an absence when
it was grinning, singing, freckling in the
English summer tweedle dee tweedle dum
in front of him.  Perhaps if Crow taught
him anything it was a constant balancing.
For want of a less dirty word: faith. 

A howling sorry which is
yes which is thank you which is onwards."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"And I stood and breathed their air and considered - as always - things like fragility, danger, luck, imperfection, chance, being kind, being funny, being honest, eyes, hair, bones, the impossible hectic silent epidermis rejuvenating itself, never nervous, always kissable, even when scabbed, even so salty I made it, and I felt so many nights utterly, totally yanked apart by how much I loved these children..."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"There's grief and there's impractical obsession.

I was impractically obsessed with before, I said."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her.  How physical my missing is.  I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more.  The whole city is my missing her."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the thing as it swells and bakes."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Again.  I beg everything again."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"We will never fight again, our lovely, quick, template-ready arguments.  Our delicate cross-stich of bickers."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Where are the fire engines?  Where is the
noise and clamour of an event like this?
Where are the strangers going out of their
way to help, screaming, flinging bits of
emergency glow-in-the-dark equipment
at us to try and settle us and save us?

There should be men in helmets speaking
a new and dramatic language of crisis.
There should be horrible levels of noise,
completely foreign and inappropriate for
our cosy London flat."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"This is my thing about why I think relationships - boyfriends, friends, anything - are such a hassle.  I've lived for almost seventeen years.  This is so much to catch somebody up about.  I want people just to arrive in my life fully informed of my tastes and fears.  The lists are pretty short, definitely memorizable.  I wish they could be distributed to would-be suitors ahead of time, so they could rule themselves out.  Or in!  I'm open to "in," too!"
-Unknown

"He wondered why we can't remember when our mothers carried us inside them:  the dark and steady heart, how it was the whole of the world, and no one harmed us, and we harmed no one."
-The Winner's Kiss by Marie Rutkoski

"But for the most part, it's the rest of the sharp and rigid world that wants to drown you, knock your teeth out, cave your skull in when you're going down.  I develop a new consciousness, at all times wondering, What am I near?  What would it do to my body if I fell on it/into it right now?  I learn you can't trust coffee table corners, rooftop edges.  You can't trust urinals either - massive grinning underbites that would get a good laugh out of leaving me to be discovered unconscious, pants down, molars scattered across the linoleum.  Hard things, tall things, and wet things - double-crossing murders.  Bathtubs are my personal nemesis though - hard, wet, and untrustworthy.  Porcelain caskets.  For a while we crack the doors during my baths so my parents can rush in if they hear splashing.  Then I switch to showers altogether."
-How To Ruin Everything by George Watsky

"Because I want the chance to cry when it rains." 
-The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

"But this is darkness.  This is grief and graves."
-The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

"His kiss interrupts me, sudden-short-sweet.  Unquestionable.  It feels like reading a favorite book, and falling for the ending even though you already know what happens." 
-The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

"That's what boys do.  They leave, and when they come back, act like it's no big deal."
-The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

"This version is a hundred feet taller and has arms.  Obviously he had arms before, but not like this.  Not like you had to think about them in italics."
-The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

"I could feel my pulse fluttering beneath his fingertips, and I had to remind myself that I knew how to breathe, that I'd been doing it my whole life."
-The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson

"Explain to me what the point of living is if you aren't willing to fight for the truths in your heart, to risk getting hurt.

You have to rage."
-This Raging Light by Estelle Laure

"I wish someone had told me this simple but confusing truth: Even when everything's going your way you can still be sad.  Or anxious.  Or uncomfortably numb.  Because you can't always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect."
-Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson

"It was thrilling to hear him pronounce my name.  It doesn't matter how simply your name is; it's always a surprise to hear it spoken aloud for the first time by someone new, how the specific arrangement of syllables sounds coming out of their mouth...He said it like it was the first time he'd said 'Harriet' in his life.  Like it was a word he'd never thought about, or needed to know before, but that he would from now on."
-Dear Emma by Katie Heaney

"There's nothing scarier than hearing someone you love cry, except imagining a world where that sound stops.  Suddenly I can't breathe.  Can't be here.  There's nothing scarier than loving someone."
-The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry

"'You don't know everything,' he says softly.  'Not yet you don't.  And when you see those good things - and I promise you, there are so many good things - they're going to be so much brighter for you than they are for other people, just like the abyss seems deeper and bigger when you stare at it.  If you stick it out, it's all going to feel worth it in the end.  Every moment you live, every darkness you face, they'll all feel worth it when you're staring light in the face.'"
-The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry

"It was only three years ago, but I looked so young, with that carefree smile."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"Even the constellations can see us now:  we are seventeen and shattered and still dancing.  We have messy, throbbing hearts, and we are stronger than anyone could ever know."
-When We Collided by Emery Lord

"After all, artists - especially writers - need more alone time than regular people.  They crave solitude whereas many people fear it.  They resign themselves to financial uncertainty whereas most people do anything they can to avoid it.  Moreover, if an artist is lucky, her work becomes her legacy, thus theoretically lessening the burden of producing a child to carry it out."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the decision Not to Have Kids  by Meghan Daum

"it has been a beautiful
fight

still
is."
-You Get So Alone at Times by Charles Bukowski

"If she could stand it, I'd tell her that sometimes she can be pretty funny - in a Maggie Smith-ish way - and has a kind of grit I don't see in many other women.  I'd tell her I'm no longer secretly trying to change her, to make her more outgoing or liberal or spendy.

I want her to know I have learned the difference between pampering and love, adventure and life experience, mothers and fathers.

I see now what she did for my dad and me, how she let our relationship stay simple and uncomplicated by drawing the fouls and taking the hits.  It was her gift to me as a girl in the world, and I will give the same gift to my daughters. 

I want her to know that I have seen how the light changes over the course of the day and I know that the rooms that start cold get warmer.

I'd tell her that I know now that there are no daughters who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, neglect, baffle, appall, incite, or insult their mothers. 

I want her to know that although I vote for Democrats and cry easily and still spend all my money going to places no one ever needs to go, I hate shopping and cooking.  I live within my means and worship my girlfriends, especially the ones who play cards and rag me about keeping the thermostat set too low.  I don't long for other mothers anymore; I don't even wonder about them.  I was meant to be her daughter, and I consider it a damn good thing that she, or all people, was the principal agent in my development. 

I want to tell my mom that I admire her, the quiet hero of 168 Wooded Lane the way she marched head-on into each uncertain moment, changing as the circumstances demanded, like finding a good-paying job at forty-eight with three kids in college. 

Even though I don't always know what she's talking about or why something bothers her or what's making her smile, it doesn't matter, I don't care anymore, I love her."
-Glitter and Glue: A Memoir by Kelly Corrigan

"The thing about mothers, I want to say, is that once the containment ends and one becomes two, you don't always fit together so neatly.  They don't get you like you want them to, like you think they should, they could, if only they would pay closer attention.  They agonize over all the wrong things, cycling trough one inane idea after another: seat belts, flossing, the Golden Rule.  The living mother-daughter relationship, you learn over and over again, is a constant choice between adaptation and acceptance."
-Glitter and Glue: A Memoir by Kelly Corrigan

"'You could rattle the stars,' she whispered.  'You could do anything, if you only dared.  And deep down, you know it, too.  That's what scares you most.'"
-Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

"'I'm not afraid of dying.  But I am afraid of dying here.'  She swept her hand over the room, the tavern, the city.  'I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still."
-A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab

"I have been made to protect you.  Only in death will I be kept from this oath." 
-Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

"For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is.  Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life.  Stop waiting.  That is it:  there's nothing else.  It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever."
-The Magicians by Lev Grossman

"She is catalyst.

She is chaos.

I can see why he loves her."
-Illuminae by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman

"You all know fear is poison in battle."
-Illuminae by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman

"'I never promised the universe that I would be a great writer, goddamn it!  I just promised the universe that I would be a writer'"

At seventy-five pages in, I nearly stopped.  It felt too terrible to continue, too deeply embarrassing.  But I pushed through my own shame only because I decided that I refused to go to my grave with seventy-five pages of an unfinished manuscript sitting in my desk drawer.  I did not want to be that person.  The world is filled with too many unfinished manuscripts as it is, and I didn't want to add another one to that bottomless pile.  So no matter how much I thought my work stank, I had to persist.

I also kept remembering what my mother always used to say: 'Done is better than good.'"
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"I think it was my parents' example of quietly impudent self-assertion that gave me the idea that I could be a writer, or at least that I could go out there and try.  I never recall my parents expressing any worry whatsoever at my dreams of becoming a writer.  If they did worry, they kept quiet about it - but honestly, I don't think they were concerned.  I think they had faith that I would always be able to take care of myself, because they had taught me to.  (Anyhow, the golden rule in my family is this: If you're supporting yourself financially and you're not bothering anyone else, then you're free to do whatever you want with your life.)

Maybe because they didn't worry too much about me, I didn't worry too much about me, either.

It also never occurred to me to go ask an authority figure for permission to become a writer."
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"And that would be a pity, because your life is short and rare and amazing and miraculous, and you want to do really interesting things and make really interesting things while you're still here.  I know that's what you want for yourself, because that's what I want for myself, too.

It's what we all want. 

And you have treasures hidden within you - extraordinary treasures - and so do I, and so does everyone around us.  And bringing those treasures to light takes work and faith and focus and courage and hours of devotion, and the clock is ticking, and the world is spinning, and we simply do not have time anymore to think so small."
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"It isn't always comfortable or easy - carrying your fear around with you on your great and ambitious road trip, I mean - but it's always worth it, because if you can't learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you'll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting."
-Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

"If you're lucky, home is not only a place you leave, but also a place where you someday arrive."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"If you're a daughter, your mother's face is your first mirror, and if you share her features - in our case hazel eyes, brown hair, a serious amount of freckles, a small frame with those 'narrow shoulders held erect' - odds are you'll unconsciously adopt her attitude of self-regard.  My mother considered herself to be plain, if not homely, and so I believed her, and so I considered myself...I carried this phantom twin wherever I went, no matter that I couldn't have been more different myself..."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"I wondered what my childhood home might reveal about me to a stranger.  It never ceases to astonish me how readily we presume to know ourselves, when in fact we know so little."
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"Besides, I decided, isn't that how falling in love so often works?  Some stranger appears out of nowhere and becomes a fixed star in your universe." 
-Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"Eventually, whether you choose or are chosen, joyously accept or grudgingly resist, you take the plunge.

You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.

But what if it wasn't this way?

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending?

What would that look and feel like?"
 -Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
-Philip Pullman

"People amaze me, how they need to jump on every tragedy or even potential tragedy like it belongs to them, how they can't leave well enough alone when they get the chance to be involved in something."
-This Raging Light by Estelle Laure

"She constructed a fragile and changeable thing that almost resembled courage.  She hoped it would be enough."
-Fire by Kristin Cashore

"She didn't want to be released into the wild.  She wanted to be held dear.  To belong to a place and a family, irrevocably." 
-Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

"Wishes are false.  Hope is true.  Hope makes its own magic."
-Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

"'So you are a child of love.  It seems right, that you were made by love.'

She had never thought of herself in that way, but after he said it, it struck her as a fine thing, to have been made by love, and she ached for what she had lost, in losing her family."
-Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor

"I have spent the best and worst moments of my life looking my sister in the eye."
-Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

"She was smart enough to want more but tired enough to accept the way things were."
-Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

"A man has never told me he likes me.  Like is more interesting than love."
-Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

"Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image."
-Difficult Women by Roaxane Gay

"Truly, my bed is the greatest place in the world." 
-The Crown of Embers by Rae Carson

"Be your own place of safety, she told herself." 
-Days of Blood & Starlight by Laini Taylor

"Witches are just women who are naturally attuned to magic in our world," Nell said.  "They can manipulate it, when others can't even sense its presence." 
-The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding by Alexandra Bracken

"Because magic wasn't in the elements.  Magic lived in the spaces, in the emptiness between all things, connecting them.  It waited there for those who knew how to find it, for those who had the born ability to grasp those connections - the Mageus." 
-The Last Magician by Lisa Maxwell

"Now I have to tell you how foolish I am.  Before that gray and lifeless time following Rook's departure, I'd always scoffed at stories in which maidens pine for their absent suitors, boys they've hardly known a week and have no business falling for.  Didn't they realize their lives were worth more than the dubious affection of one silly young man?  That there were things to do in a world that didn't revolve solely around their heartbreak?

Then it happens to you, and you understand you aren't any different from those girls after all.  Oh, they still seem just as absurd - you've simply joined them, in quite a humbling way.  But isn't absurdity part of being human?  We aren't ageless creatures who watch centuries pass from afar.  Our worlds are small, our lives are short, and we can only bleed a little before we fall." 
-An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Rogerson

"I am a twentieth-century black Lizzie Bennett.  I like a boy.  I like talking to him, I like his eyebrows, I like his laugh when I tease him, i like how he debates me on nineteenth-century heroines and twentieth-century superheroes, I like his secret sports conversations with my dad, I like how he focuses so hard when he dances even though he's not good at it, I like how he skates like he was born to do it.  I like what I like and I don't like what I don't.  I have nothing to apologize for."
-All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages by Saundra Mitchell

"Other people don't exist just to be your happy ending, you know?"
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"And maybe life is when you gather all the things you can hold on to and carry with you, and cross your fingers it'll be enough."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"The people who matter to you most - you aren't always going to occupy that same space in their lives, I guess."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"Maybe it takes everything you have, every last atom, to sail past that dark idea, and then on arrival all you have to offer the world is your exhausted, battered self.  But that's everything.  You know?  It's enough."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"At least when you hoard the past for yourself it's still yours.  It's like art, really: you tack it down somewhere flat and static, and then no one can take it away from you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"From watching my parents I think being married or being with someone else in any kind of real way takes a certain amount of bravery, and it's not something I'm positive I have in me.  To pluck your heart from your chest that way and hand it to someone, unprotected, and wait to see how gently they'll stitch it back in for you, or not - to wake up all those days you're the crappiest version of yourself and face the person who knows you best, morning after morning, year after year."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"It's both the best thing that can happen to you and the most dangerous, because what do you have except the people you belong to and who belong to you?  But then you can also lose yourself to it; you can do things in service of those wes that end up haunting you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"I guess I've always believed that's what a relationship is, this space you keep between you where you hold each other's secrets.  Or that it's how you build something together, layering the things you've never told anyone else like bricks."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"I'd like to say I lost myself for a moment, and that's why.  But that's the easy way out.  It seems equally possible that in those moments you just let go, when you give in to your impulses, that those are the moments that are most you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"I wished my dad had something to hope for and I wished my mom had less to fear."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"It's a profoundly lonely feeling when someone who's supposed to love you doesn't have it in them to be around you."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"Because these are the best kind of moments: all of us plotting what we'll eat, that comfort you can slip into with the people who know you best, who love you with a fierceness you'll probably never understand.

I'm lucky.  I've always been."
-Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert

"'What's your take on things?'
'You mean God?'
'No.  I'm good with God.  I only mean...church people seem awfully hard on you for you to keep loving them."
-Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney Stevens

"I want the power to invent whatever me I desire, but I need to know I can come home and home will look like home."
-Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney Stevens

"Basically we're all looking for someone who knows who we are and will break it to us gently."
-Robert Brault

"(Sometimes that's all you need, my love - another woman's faith in you.)" 

-Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough 

"(Why, though, does it take
a mother, daughter, sister
for men to take
a woman at her word?)"
-Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough

"I will show you what a woman can do."
-Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough

"I make another vow.  One day I will be loved for my music and my mind by someone who puts me above everything else.  Maybe someone who is discovering love for the first time too.  I will not be a secret.  I will be a declaration."
-You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon

"Our relationship probably won't ever be what it was before we started growing into our own skin.  Before we hurt each other.  Before the world hurt us.  Maybe we'll never fully understand each other or know all of each other's secrets, and surely we'll never recapture our childhood innocence.  But we can have something new.  Something messy and real and imperfect, because that's what both of us are." 
-You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon

"She didn't like that I was trailing behind her.  I knew it.  We'd had that conversation before.  The one where she says she wants me to feel more special when i'm with her, not less.  The one where I admit that I sometimes feel less significant when I'm with her and she admits it's hard to feel like her success sometimes hurts me.  The one where Dee says that she has me on a pedestal, that I'm her hero, that her confidence in me is greater than my confidence in myself - and that drives her crazy.  The one that ends with tears because our feelings are so knotted together, we don't know how to untie them." 
-Voice Lessons by Cara Mentzel

"My sister and I shared love, but we often haven't shared our lives.  I've wished we did."
-Voice Lessons by Cara Mentzel

"I've wished I were a habit for her, that when she fiddled absentmindedly with her phone she always thought to call me." 
-Voices Lessons by Cara Mentzel

"But my heart is a fucking drama queen." 
-The Beauty That Remains by Ashley Woodfolk

"I imagine Dina and I were like a lot of sisters.  When we were younger we shared a laundry basket and chores.  We couldn't veer farther from each other than a closed bedroom door.  But we were getting older.  We no longer shared a home, and no longer saw each other every day.  Yet our bond was indisputable.  There was a tacit quality to our closeness, an abiding undercurrent of security, unaffected by physical distance or the frequency of our phone calls.  I often consider all the possibilities, the ways the bond between sisters is developed.  For Dina and me, perhaps it can be traced to the length of time we'd known each other?  The familiarity of each other's face, skin, smell, or voice?  Our shared gene pool or shared past experiences?   Or maybe, as the younger sister, I was (and continue to be) bound to Dina because I know no world without her in it. 

Still, I wanted to feel like a friend to Dina, not a perpetual little sister.  I'd hoped the different between our ages would feel more narrow the further we traveled into our futures.  But even in our mid-twenties, I didn't feel like it had.  Moreover, I felt more self-conscious with her than with anyone else.  I tried not to be, but trying not to be self-conscious is like trying not to yawn.  I was even anxious talking to dina on the phone.  If I knew she was going to call I'd construct a mental list of discussion topics, news I could share with her and questions I could ask her."
-Voices Lessons by Cara Mentzel

"This was another tricky part of being Dina's sister, of being anyone's sibling, probably.  Comparison is built into your very existense.  Someone is always the Smart One.  The Talented One.  The Funny One.  You can't both be fast, one of you has to be faster - The Fast One.  Even if someone else isn't passing judgement, you're making the comparisons on your own."
-Voice Lessons by Cara Mentzel

"Or institute a progressive artists' colony where young dreamers could take up their own work.  She could help them avoid the eighteen-hour days, the perpetual temper tantrums, the name-dropping, the ego trip, the talentless and tormented."
-Why We Came to the City by Kristopher Jansma

"I woke up each morning and watched her dance in the sunlight coming through the curtains and thought, Jesus, she is the most magnificent girl I have ever seen.  Sometimes my breath would even catch and my eyes tear up at her effortless joy and perfection.  And then I walked to my bathroom to get ready for the day and swore under my breath at the haggard and fat reflection staring back at me.  Until one day it hit me.  In a few years Gigi will stand in front of her own mirror, hating her own thick thighs and giant feet.  She'll call herself fat and disgusting.  She might even think, for a moment, that it would just be easier to not exist at all.  I don't know what would destroy me more.  The part that she could even for one moment think that she is anything other than beautiful, or the fact that she learned it all from me.

Of all the hobbies I have picked up and dropped over the years - the fiddle, magic, competitive eating - body hate has been my most dedicated and refined.  And now with the birth of just one tiny and beautiful girl, everything I knew about myself had changed."
-Fat Girl Walking by Brittany Gibbons

"I hop in the shower and assure myself that behind every good woman is a little back fat."
-American Housewives by Helen Ellis

"Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body."
-Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

"The experience of being alive, it's isness, maybe in relation to the future isn'tness of death or maybe independent of that, or maybe a hybrid of both, can hurt so much sometimes.  Sometimes it still hurts so much to be alive that I want to die.  I am scared of dying and sad about dying and that is part of the hurt."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I think it was then that I first made the connection that underneath my anxiety was a great sadness.  When I suppressed the sadness, I practically shook with existential fear over simply existing.  I was fighting myself.  But when the tears flowed, I felt better."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"For someone with anxiety, dramatic situations are, in a way, more comfortable than the mundane.  In dramatic situations the world rises to meet your anxiety.  When there are no dramatic situations available, you turn the mundane into the dramatic."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I feel bad about my struggle, because it's nothing compared to other people's struggles and yet it still hurts."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"If people never become real, it's harder for them to disappoint you.  That's why the Internet is good for sad people.  You can be with people without having to be with people."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"Like a home's something you have to earn when you're seventeen."
-The Boy Most Likely To by Huntley Fitzpatrick

"There is a large part of me, the committee, that wants to see me dead.  If it can't kill me, it'll settle for seeing me miserable.  It wants me spinning out on what I lack, talking to myself.  I don't know why these forces exist in me that want me to die, I guess I'm just wired that way.  But it's cool that there is this other part of me that must really want to live.  I don't have scientific proof of its existence, and I don't need it.  I'm still alive.  So I know it's there."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"When I'm sleeping, the committee stays up all night and then greets me at dawn with really bad ideas.  It's like, Good morning!  Everything is shit!  Time to act impulsively.  But first let's start by getting into fights with imaginary people from the past.  Next let's catalog everything that's wrong with you and your life.  Also, I want to remind you of everything you don't have - and everything you should be scared of losing.  Let's begin." 
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"The thing is, I'm self-centered.  I guess I'd prefer some cosmic judge thinking shitty things about me, rather than nothing thinking about me at all."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"Perhaps it is that I am of the stars and he is of the earth."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"We got to be magic together.  But is magic even real?

I want what is unreal to rescue me from the world.  I want to be a shadow of myself dancing."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"What happens to the space that two people occupied together?  How can it just disappear?  Why can it just become something else?"
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"(The thing about spending eight consecutive hours in a confined space with the same people day after day is there will always be that one person who appears more special and attractive than he or she actually is.)"
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I'm in love with you and you don't want anything to do with me so I think we can make this work: a love story."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"I could say 'I love my body' so that I appear to be a good feminist.  But that only means pretending to love something I hate."
-So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

"For if we could be satisfied with anything, we should have been satisfied long ago."
-Seneca

"Hate is a lot like love.  It's warm and fills you up every part of you is tingling to release it."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"'Hell, we were high school sweethearts.'

That's the most depressing part about the whole thing.  People who have prom pictures together should never get a divorce."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"I grip my knees with both hands and try to hold my body together.  I'm about to rip at the seams; if I cry, everything inside me is going to fly out.  When someone opens the door, pieces of me will be borne away on the wind.  I'll never be able to find all of them.  I'll never be whole.  I'll never be whole."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"His hands grip the wheel, his knuckles white, and I stare at them for a moment, lost in a memory of him teaching me to write, his fingers gently guiding my own.  This is the man who gave me words.  But he didn't listen when I tried to use them."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"I know that if I want to understand what it means to let someone in, someone other than Benny, I'll have to take a risk.  I have to hope that he won't let me down.  That he can be a person who is a place - a place where I can go and call a time-out on all the uncertainty and awfulness of my life."
-Something Real by Heather Demetrois

"We visit their families.  We look at their photos, we meet their college friends.  All this contributes to a sense that we've done our homework.  We haven't.  Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating."
-Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person by Alain de Botton

"'When you look into your baby's eyes,' my friend Sarah once said to me, 'that will become your Tibet.'  I have no doubt that looking into one's own baby's eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"But to me, the lack of desire to have a child is innate.  It exists outside of my control.  It is simply who I am and I can take neither credit nor blame for all that it may or may not signify.  But the decision to honor that desire, to find a way to be whole or my own terms even if it means facing the judgment, scorn, and even pity of mainstream society, is a victory.  It's a victory I celebrate every day."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"I decided to take the love I'd have for a child and give it to myself instead."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"But herein lies the rub: as it stands now, I suspect that my commitment to and delight in parenting would be formidable that it would take precedence over anything and everything else in my life; that my mastery of motherhood would eclipse my need for - or ability to achieve - success in any other arena.  Basically, I'm afraid of my own competence."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children."
-Doris Lessing

"Brokenheartedness is a sisterhood with involuntary membership."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"When I'd texted him to say I wouldn't need a ride, he'd replied with an empty 'OK.'  I didn't know what I'd expected him to say, but tears itched at my eyes.  I'm a basket case, I thought.  Who gets emotional over two letters?  But then I remembered that 'no' also has only two letters.  Almost everyone in the world has cried over those."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"'What are we waiting for?'  The words hung in the air for a moment, and I wondered if he knew what I meant.  I was still tiptoeing, not daring to cross the friendship line.'"
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"I wondered where somewhere was.  I wondered if this was a date.  I wondered if he had planned all of this and what it meant.  But most of all, I wondered if a person could actually burst from so many feelings at once."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"I weighed it in my mind for the thousandth time: the fluttering in my chest versus the shattering possibility of destroying our friendship.

And even though I rolled my eyes, I made my way toward him."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"Things change.  There are so many outside forces coming at marriage; finances and jobs and houses and children.  You can lose each other if you're not careful.  It doesn't mean it was all a wash."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"When it all closes in, there are only two kinds of people: best friends and everyone else."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"She behaved as if there had always been the One Great Leaving and each iteration of it brought the same welling up.  A love that big could only create havoc, and I hurried out of her arms, ashamed to be the one who could stir her up like that."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"Meanwhile, I'm an introvert and so is Brendan.  Children exhaust us, even the ones we love most.  Our solitude is the most valuable thing we have, and we cherish it above most other things and work hard to maintain it."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"She couldn't escape the storms raging in her own skull any more than I was now able to escape mine.  I worried that if I had a baby, I'd inflict this on her.  I would be a good mother in every way I could, but I'd also be a very troubled one."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"God, why do I have to be a person who yearns so much?"
-P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han

"When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them.  You try to keep track of everything in your head.  But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand:  all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit.  That's why you can't save it all up like that.

Because by the time you finally see each other, you're catching up only on the big things, because it's too much bother to tell about the little things.  But the little things are what make up life."
-To All the Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han

"...they seem to forget that you're a mere mortal: flesh and bone, bruisable and scareable."
-Where She Went by Gayle Forman

"I wonder how I ever thought I was desirable.  But inside, I know.  I used to have sparkle, self-assurance.  I didn't turn green and serious and grave eyed at first."
-The Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

"I like people too much or not at all.  I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them."
-The Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

"After all, artists - especially writers - need more alone time than regular people.  They crave solitude whereas many people fear it.  They resign themselves to financial uncertainty whereas most people do anything can to avoid it.  Moreover, if an artist is lucky, her work becomes her legacy, thus theoretically lessening the burden of producing a child to carry it out."
-Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids by Meghan Daum

"Listen to the mustn'ts, child.  Listen to the don'ts.  Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts.  Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me...anything can happen, child.  Anything can be."
-Listen to the Mustn'ts by Shel Silverstein

"It's been a beautiful
fight

still
is."
-You Get So Alone at Times by Charles Bukowski

"'You could rattle the stars,' she whispered.  'You could do anything, if you only dared.  And deep down, you know it, too.  That's what scares you most.'"
-Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

"To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly."
-Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

"For just one second, look at your life and see how perfect it is.  Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life.  Stop waiting.  This is it:  there's nothing else.  It's here, and you'd better decide to enjoy it or you're going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever."
-The Magicians by Lev Grossman

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are.  They deserve respect.  If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."
-The Real Thing: A Play by Tom Stoppard

"Those years weren't lost.  They simply weren't the way I'd planned them."
-Letters by Kurt Vonnegut

"It's bullshit to think of friendship and romance as being different.  They're not.  They're just variations of the same love, variations of the same desire to be close.  And like any love, it's difficult, awesome, treacherous, exhilarating, confusing - and precious."
-Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List by Rachel Cohn

"'I do not mourn the loss of my sister because she will always be with me, in my heart,' she says.  'I am, however, rather annoyed that my Tara has left me to suffer you lot alone.  I do not see as well without her.  I do not hear as well without her.  I do not feel as well without her.  I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister.  Then at least she would be here to mock my appearance and claim to be the pretty one for a change.  We have all lost our Tara, but I have lost a part of myself as well.'"
-The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

"'I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held,' Celia says when he approaches her.  'Trying to control what cannot be controlled.  I am tired of denying myself for fear of breaking things I cannot fix.  They will break no matter what we do.'"
-The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

"'Stories have changed, my dear boy,' the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad.  'There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue.  Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.  There are no longer simply tales with quests and beasts and happy endings.  The quests lack clarity of goal or path.  The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are.  And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise.  Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.  Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl.  And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?  Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act?  Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.'"
-The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

"Her throat hurt.  Her chest hurt.  Love hurt.  So why was she happy?"
-The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill