"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