"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