"'That is your role, your gift.  Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy.  Do not forget that.'  He takes another sip of his wine.  'There are many kinds of magic, after all.'"
-The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

"I tended to spend too much time with my favorite things, loved them too hard until I wore them down.  After a while, they became more like a shorthand for who I was and less like things I actually enjoyed."
-The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro

"I know that I am always alone, even when surrounded by people, so I let the emptiness in."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"And in our house, we enjoyed our togetherness but we enjoyed our apartness, too." 
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"You go through life thinking there's so much you need.  Your favorite jeans and sweater.  The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm.  Your phone and your music and your favorite books.  Mascara.  Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee.  You need you yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker.  You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried.  You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don't want to forget.  You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds.  You need your pillow - it fits the way you sleep.  You need magazines promising self-improvement.  You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots.  Your grade report from the semester you got straight As.  Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains.  You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones.  The dream catcher hanging above your bed.  The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. 

The cab was waiting outside the station. 

The airport, I said, but no sound came out.

'The airport,' I said, and we pulled away. 

You think you need all of it.

Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"Sometime later, we stand side by side at the sinks in the bathroom.  We look tired and something else, too.  It takes me a minute to identify it.  And then I know.

We look young."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"It was so hard to look at him like this, full-on and unblinking, with nowhere to hide.  I'd spent so much of our time together with him by my side that I wasn't remotely prepared for how facing him would make me quake." 
-Wicked Like a Wildfire by Lana Popovic

"If our past selves got a glimpse of us now, what would they make of us?"
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"She closes them.  I took at her.  I wish her everything good.  A friendly cab driver and short lines through security.  A flight with no turbulence and an empty seat next to her.  A beautiful Christmas.  I wish her more happiness than can fit in a person.  I wish her the kind of happiness that spills over."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"Those days and nights at the motel, I thought I was afraid of his ghost, but I wasn't.

I was afraid of my loneliness. 

And how I'd been tricked. 

And the way I'd convinced myself of so much: that I wasn't sad, that I wasn't alone.

I was afraid of the man who I'd loved, and how he had been a stranger. 

I was afraid of how I hated him.

How I wanted him back.

Of what was in those boxes and what I might someday discover and the chance I may have lost by leaving them behind. 

I was afraid of the way we'd lived without opening doors.

I was afraid we had never been at home with each other.

I was afraid of the lies I'd told myself.

The lies he'd told me.

I was afraid that our legs under the table had meant nothing.

The folding of laundry had meant nothing.

The tea and the cakes and the songs - all of it - had meant nothing."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"I was okay just a moment ago.  I will learn how to be okay again."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity.  Those days and nights in the motel room I wished each of them against the other.  I tried to make sense of what had happened, but each time I came up short.  Each time I thought I may have understood, some line of logic snapped and I was thrust back into not knowing.

It's a dark place, not knowing. 

It's difficult to surrender to. 

But I guess it's where we live most of the time.  I guess it's where we all live, so maybe it doesn't have to be so lonely.  Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty." 
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"The whole world was out there, but I was in my mother's arms, and I didn't know it yet."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"Reuniting with her mother was her motivation.  She would slay dragons to get to her.  Mother was anchor.  Mother was comfort.  Mother was home.  A girl who lost her mother was suddenly a tiny boat on an angry ocean.  Some boats eventually floated ashore.  And some boats, like me, seemed to flat farther and farther from land."
-Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

"The lace curtain flapped in the kitchen window.  The breeze today was the kind you opened the shutters for, the kind that carried away old sin and flakes of sadness."
-Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys

"I no longer feel the need to see and sense more than I've already experienced.  I just want so desperately to hang on to what I have."
-The Orange Girl by Jostein Gaarder

"He was awake enough to wonder if he'd been making bad decisions for his entire life.  If he'd been a bad decision, himself, even before he was born." 
-The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

"But our church shall be the starry night, / Our altar the grassy earth outspread, / And our priest the muttering wind."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

"He wondered if he was going to go through each year of his life thinking about how stupid he'd been the year before."
-Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater

"In the early nineteenth century, women artists were by definition monstrous."
-Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

"Far from being intimidated by her accomplished male companions, she took heart from the idea that in becoming an author she was living up to her literary heritage."
-Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

"...and I turn away because she is breathtakingly beautiful and therefore very hard to look at."
-What to Say Next by Julie Buxbaum

"Kissing Kit was a privilege." 
-What to Say Next by Julie Buxbaum

"And even you...you force me to remember the home I left behind.  You make me remember my bones."
-American Street by Ibi Zoboi

"But she did not go.  Either she could not find the time, or she could not fine the energy, or it seemed a great distance to Market Square, or she remembered that on her own she was in danger from Wizard Howl - anyway, every day it seemed more difficult to go and see her sister.  It was very odd.  Sophie had always thought she was nearly as strong-minded as Lettie.  Now she was finding that there were some things she could only do when were no excuses left." 
-Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

"What made me think I wanted life to be interesting?" she asked as she ran.  "I'd be far too scared.  It comes of being the eldest of three."
-Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

"These people who had lived in the same place all of their days did not know how strange and curious the world could be.  She saw how suspicious they were of outsiders and how fearful of change.  How limited their lives seemed!" 
-Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

"...He had sent Mary a stilted love poem and she had scoffed at his efforts, declaring that she did not want an artificial composition, but instead 'a bird's eye view of your heart.'  Do not write me again, she said, 'unless you honestly acknowledge yourself bewitched.'"
- Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

"He did not want to give up his quiet lodgings and subject himself to the confusion of Mary's household, outlining his anxieties in an essay he wrote for The Enquirer in which he spoke about the dangers of "cohabitation":

'It seems to be one of the most important of the arts of life, that men should not come too near each other, or touch in too many points.  Excessive familiarity is the bane of social happiness.'"
- Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

"I wish you, for my soul, to be riveted in my heart; but I do not desire to have you always at my elbow." 
- Mary Wollstonecraft

"Another hope - Can I have another hope?"
- Mary Shelley

"Their refusal to bow down, to subside and surrender, to be quiet and subservient, to apologize and hide, makes their lives as memorable as the words they left behind.  They asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end." 
- Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon

"Seems the self you get left with on the shore, in the end, is the self that you were when you went." 
- Autumn by Ali Smith

"'You've got a good heart,'  she told him.  'Sometimes that's enough to see you safe wherever you go.'  Then she shook her head.  'But mostly, it's not.'"
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"Richard had noticed that events were cowards:  they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once."
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"There was no moon, but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars.  There were streetlights too, and lights on buildings and on bridges, which looked like earthbound stars, and they glimmered, repeated, as they were reflected with the city in the night water on the Thomas.  It's fairyland, though Richard."
- Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"On the way down into the uncanny valley, we've decided that images of women in power, in the abstract, are as important as people of any gender who are actually working to make equality a reality for everyone." 
- We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler

"Hilary intended to be a great many things, and a good little girl was not one of them."
- Magic Marks the Spot by Caroline Carlson

"(The unsatisfying thing about practicing restraint was that nobody knew you were practicing it.)" 
- Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

"It seemed they viewed her differently now.  She had status.  She mattered.  All at once they were interested in what she had to say. 

She hadn't fully understand that before this, she hadn't mattered, and she felt indignant but also, against all logic, gratified.  And also fraudulent.  It was confusing."
- Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

"The thought didn't disturb her.  She had used this room up, she felt.  She had used this life up." 
- Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

"There is no special word for 'you' when it is you that I am speaking to.  In English there is only one 'you,' and I have to say the same 'you' to you that I would say to a estranger; I cannot express my closeness.  I am homesick in this country, but I am thinking I would be homesick in my own country now, also.  I have no longer any home to go back to - no relatives, no position, and my friends have lived three years without me.  There is no place for me.  So I have to pretend I am fine here.  I have to pretend everything is...how you say?  Hunky-dory." 
- Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

"Running away and pursuing one's dream was quite a piratical thing to do." 
- Magic Marks the Spot by Caroline Carlson

"I thought: 'I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness.'"
- I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

"You will go in to tea, my girl - and a much better tea than you would have come by this time last year." 
-I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

"She could do it in the dark, in fair weather or foul; she can do it even when it seems she will run out of gas.  It doesn't matter what people tell you.  It doesn't matter what they might say.  Sometimes you have to leave home.  Sometimes, running away means you're headed in the exact right direction." 
-Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

"It fills me with warmth, running liquid through me, but it won't thaw my mind.  'Why does it have to be, like, based off someone else?  Why don't you just do what you want?'

'What I want is to be around people I care about.'

'Oh.'  I blink at the ceiling once, twice, eyelids getting heavy, eyes gutting fuzzy.  It makes sense when she says it like that." 
-This Adventure Ends by Emma Mills

"Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced.  But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.  The future I thought I was meticulously crafting for years has disappeared, and with it have gone my ideas about the kind of life I'd imagined I was due.

People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much.  I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it.  But it was exploded."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"But you can never tell with shadows.  You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you're crazy, but maybe you're right." 
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism - a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we wold live, what would become of us.  Writers may be particularly susceptible to this outlook, because we are accustomed to the power of authorship.  (Even if you write nonfiction, you still control how the story unfolds.)  Life was complying with my story.

There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"She grew up as I did, with her own bedroom, in a house with a garden and a green lawn, but with a sense that ruin was at a safe distance."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising.  We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers.  We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills.  But we can't have it all." 
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"OK.  OK.  Are you defensive?  Yes.  But everyone is defensive.  And I think it's a bit different for you because you do a lot of work explaining your own behavior and thoughts to yourself so it's extra hard to hear an outsider's point of view and/or someone who spends no time considering her own action (aka someone like me)."
- I Hate Everyone But You by Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin

"I am basically a manic pixie nightmare." 
-I Hate Everyone But You by Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin

"And here I am, still alive, still in the world.  It's my intention to carry on being alive in the world, well, until I die.  At Easter I'll go to Glasgow and see what science fiction fandom is like.  Next June I'll take my exams and pass them, and have qualifications.  Then I'll do A level, as it best works out.  I'll go to university.  I'll live, and read, and have friends, a karass, people to talk to.  I'll grow and change and be myself.  I'll belong to libraries wherever I go.  Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.  I'll speak to varies as I see them and do magic as it comes my way and prevents harm - I'm not going to forget anything.  But I won't use it to cheat or to make my life unreal or go against the pattern.  Things will happen that I can't imagine.  I'll change and grow into a future that will be unimaginably different from the past.  I'll be alive.  I'll be me.  I'll be reading my book.  I'll never drown my books or break my staff.  I'll learn while I live.  Eventually I'll come to death, and die, and I'll go on through death to new life, or even, or whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when they did.  I'll die and rot and return my cells to life, in the pattern, whatever planet I happen to be on at the time.

That's what life is, and how I intend to live it."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"If you love books enough, books will love you back."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"It's just like the line in the Aeneid, Et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, "even these things it will one day be a joy to recall."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"We went down the hill to the bookshop, sort of automatically, as if that's the way all our feet wanted to turn.  I said that to them.

'Bibliotropic,' Hugh said.  'Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun.  We naturally turn towards the bookshop.'"
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"There may be stranger reasons for being alive.

There are books.  There's Auntie Teg, and Grampar.  There's Sam, and Gill.  There's interlibrary loan. There are books you can fall into and pull up over your head.  There's the distant hope of a karass sometime in the future.  There's Glorfindel who really care about me as much as a fairy can care about anything."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"We marvel at the unexpected ways people find each other."
-The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"As everything else has fallen apart, what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity.  Hope."
-The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"May her memory be a blessing."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end.  Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn't supposed to happen after the glorious last stand."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Rune never said anything about it.  But to anyone who had known him a long time, it was as if he shrank a couple of inches in the years that followed.  As if he sort of crumpled with a deep sigh and never really breathed properly again."
-A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

"The bookstore is the building, but it's not only the building.  It is the books inside.  People are not only their bodies.  And if there is no hope of saving the things we love in their original form, we must save them however we can."
-Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley

"I'll tell her that I think he had been transmigrating all his life: leaving himself in the things he loved, in the people he loved.  He brimmed over the edges of his own life, and escaped."
-Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley

"But you know this already, Rachel.

You know that you must hold on to any laws that you can find.

I love my son, and he is the law that cannot be tinkered with.  Love of the things that make you happy is steady too - books, words, music, art - these are lights that reappear in a broken universe."
-Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley

"We are the books we read and things we love.  Cal is the ocean and the letters he left.  Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind."
-Words in Deep Blue by Cath Crowley

"It's lovely when writers I like like each other."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization.

Libraries really are wonderful.  They're better than bookshops, even.  I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Still on the subject of eating, we don't have our own plates, or our own knives and forks or cups.  Like most of what we use, they're communal, they're handed out at random.  There's no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness.  Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup.  Nobody can get fond of anything.

At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to.  Grampar's chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself.  Gramma's shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast.  My mother's shoes positively vibrated with consciousness.  Our toys looked out for us.  There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn't use.  It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she'd cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood.  If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding.  After she died, that faded.  Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present.  They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.

None of these things did anything.  The coffee spoons didn't stir the coffee without being held or anything.  They didn't have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished.  (We always felt they might at any moment.)  I suppose what they really did was psychological.  They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry.  Here there is no tapestry, we jangle about separately."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books.  When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"Let them fear me as long as they leave me alone.  Let them hate me as long as they fear me."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"It doesn't matter.  I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books."
-Among Others by Jo Walton

"The door opens silently when I push - it hasn't rusted the way I have."
-If We Were Villains by M. L. Rio