"'Magic doesn't require beauty,' she said.  'Easy magic is pretty.  Great magic asks that you trouble the waters.  It requires a disruption, something new."
-Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo

"There's such a lot of different Annes in me.  I sometimes think that is why I'm such a troublesome person.  If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn't be half so interesting."
-Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

"This is why I run. 

Because caring was a thing with claws.  It sank them in, and didn't let go.  Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg, more than a few broken ribs, more than anything that bled or broke and healed again.  Caring didn't break you clean.  It was a bone that didn't set, a cut that wouldn't close."
-A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab

"father.  you always call to say nothing in particular.  you ask what i'm doing or where i am and when the silence stretches like a lifetime between us i scramble to find questions to keep the conversation going.  what i long to say most is.  i understand this world broke you.  it has been so hard on your feet.  i don't blame you for not knowing how to remain soft with me.  sometimes i stay up thinking of all the places you are hurting which you'll never care to mention.  i come from the same aching blood.  from the same bone so desperate for attention i collapse in on myself.  i am your daughter.  i know the small talk is the only way you know how to tell me you love me.  cause it is the only way i know how to tell you."
-milk & honey by rupi kaur

"I contemplated the skyline this double feeling came to me as one thought, pressing in from either side of the bridge, impossible for me to reconcile: It is ludicrous for anyone to live here and I can never leave."
-Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

"Sometimes my sadness felt so deep it must have been inherited.  It had a refrain, and though I evened out my breathing by the time I got to First Avenue, the refrain wouldn't leave me.  It was guttural and illogical and I repeated it endlessly like a chant: Please don't leave me, please don't leave me, please don't leave me.  All the way home, against the bored, anorexic kids on Bedford Avenue, against the lurid tinkling of bodega music, and the dull thunder of the J train on the bridge.  I heard myself say it out loud when I got into my bedroom.  I kicked the mattress that lay on the floor.  That's when I realized how far away I was.  I saw the ravine.  I had traveled a great distance, just one stop away.  Please don't leave me.  I guess it made sense - I had never felt more alone."
-Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

"Does anyone come to New York clean?  I'm afraid not.  But crossing the Hudson I thought of crossing Lethe, milky river of forgetting.  I forgot that I had a mother who drove away before I could open my eyes, and a father who moved invisibility through the rooms of our house.  I forgot the parade of people in my life as thin as mesh screens, who couldn't catch whatever it was I wanted to say to them, and I forgot how I drove down dirt roads between desiccated fields, under an oppressive guard of stars, and felt nothing.

Yes, I'd come to escape, but from what?  The twin pillars of football and church?  The low, faded homes on childless cul-de-sacs  Mornings of the Gazette and boxed doughnuts?  The sedated, sentimental middle of it?  It didn't matter.  I would never know exactly, for my life, like most, moved only imperceptibly and definitely forward."
-Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

"I love you more than I love books."

Gifford laughed and leaned down to kiss her, but the priest cleared his throat.  "Ring.  Then more vows.  Kissing comes last."

Gifford heaved a melodramatic sigh and offered his hand.  "Very well."
-My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand

"Children know the world is deep and dark and bright and beautiful.  We don't have to teach them that.  Instead we have to equip them to slay the monsters and hold fast to what is true and good."
-Lyz Lenz

"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

"We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over."
-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

"It wasn't my first trip to Europe.  I'd taken other trips there, and they left dark memories.  Maybe I just get depressed in Europe, I thought.  It's my major character flaw."
-I'll Tell You In Person by Chloe Caldwell

"Every day here is a challenge, a privilege, a sacrifice, and a frustration.  But when I think about every little step I've taken to be here in this place, starting from when I was eleven years old, I focus.  I remember.
-Unknown

"I, Abby Ives, am falling in love at seventeen and without any of my apparent flaws fixed.  I'm just me, and this is still happening."
-The Summer of Jordi Pereze (And the Best Burger in Los Angeles) by Amy Spalding

"And I think about all the things we could
     be
if we were never told our bodies were not
     built for them."
-The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

"When I'm told to have faith
in the father the son
in men     and men are the first ones

to make me feel so small."
-The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

"Boys are straight-up sorcery."
-Puddin' by Julie Murphy

"Come, come, whoever you are.  Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.  It doesn't matter.  Ours is not a caravan of despair.  Come even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.  Come, yet again, come, come."
-Jalaluddin Rumi

"How could Margot say something like that?
 
What made sex so integral that people couldn't separate the emotional love they felt from one physical act?

Love shouldn't hinge solely on exposing your physical body to another person.  Love was intangible.  Universal.  It was whatever someone wanted it to be and should be respected as such.  For Alice, it was staying up late and talking about nothing and everything and anything because you didn't want to sleep - you'd miss them too much.  It was catching yourself smiling at them because wow, how does this person exist??  before they caught you.  It was the intimacy of shared secrets.  The comfort of unconditional acceptance.  It was a confidence in knowing no matter what happened that person would always be there for you."
-Let's Talk About Love by Claire Kann

"Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes.
In the sense that almost certainly
(in a more perfect world, or even with a little more
care in this very imperfect one)
both partners might be found more suitable mates.
But the real soul-mate is the one you are actually married to."
-J.R.R. Tolkien

"leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he's never
visited.  you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea.  a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid.  don't wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bough because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them.  you had to have him. 
and you did.  and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic.  make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic.  place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don't lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge.  and you
are not stupid.  you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand.  heart
like a four-poster bed.  heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street."
-Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell by Marty McConnell

"my first love
was a boy
made up of
paper,
magic,
& scars."
-Amanda Lovelace

"The two of them were stoic and stone-faced and ten feet apart, currently not even looking at each other, but Zuzana had the impression of a pair of magnets pretending not to be magnets. 
Which, you know, only works until it doesn't."
-Dreams of Gods & Monsters by Laini Taylor

"What a miracle it is to have people to come home to every day.
To be loved.
To be expected."
-Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

"She's well fed.  She's well loved.  She can say her parents are lame because they are not.  Wherever she goes, she will always be able to return to them."
-Girl in Pieces by Kathleen Glasgow

"Panic for the man, yearning for the dragons; most young ladies would feel the reverse."
-A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

"Music will work the same way as magic does, sometimes."
-Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"'There are thousands and thousands of things we have not believed that have turned out to be true,' said Charles.  'One should not ignore the smallest glimmer of possibility.'"
-Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"The train was twice the size Sophie had expected and green.  It was the green that emeralds and dragons usually come in, which felt to Sophie like a good omen."
-Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"Crowds made her ache.  They were too much like a sinking ship."
-Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"'First of all, it will break my heart if they take you away.  You have been the great green adventure of my life.  Without you my days would be unlit." 
-Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"Mothers were a place to put down your heart.  They were a resting stop to recover your breath."
-Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"'On the contrary,' said Charles.  'The more words in a house the better, Miss Eliot.'"
-The Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"But he had kindness where other people had lungs, and politeness in his fingertips."
-Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

"Any emotion, good or bad, lasts only a few moments unless we feed it.  We are especially good at feeing anger, and Dr. Davis called the bits of kindling we toss onto the fire 'anger up thoughts.'  We use them without thinking, and it takes practice to pick them out."
-Borderline by Mishell Baker

"Bod shrugged.  'So?' he said.  'It's only death.  I mean, all fo my best friends are dead.'
'Yes.' Silas hesitated.  'They are.  And they are, for the most part, done with the world.  You are not.  You're alive, Bod.  That means you have infinite potential.  You can do anything, make anything, dream anything.  If you change the world, the world will change.  Potential.  Once you're dead, it's gone.  Over.  You've made what you've made, dreamed your dream, written your nam.  You may be buried here, you may even walk.  But that potential is finished."
-The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

"'What was he waiting for?'
'All I could feel,' said Caius Pmpeius, 'was the waiting.'"
-The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

"Being alive, she realized, was very tiresome."
-Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi

"Losing him had unzipped her from top to bottom, and yet, her love for him had solidified her spirit.  She was broken and unbroken all at once, and the longer she stayed in Ferenwood without him, the lonelier she became."
-Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi

"I want things that I can name, and some things that I can't."
-The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

"Touching him is order and chaos, like being assembled and disassembled at the same time."
-The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

"Growing up and seeing your parents' flaws is like losing you religion."
-The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

"There's a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan.  It doesn't mean love at first sight.  It's closer to love at second sight.  It's the feeling when you meet someone that you're going to fall in love with them.  Maybe you don't love them right away, but it's inevitable that you will."
-The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

"So they would know where they were from.
So they would know where they were going."
-The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon

"(In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you.)"
-Shrill by Lindy West

"Only women.  Show us your bones, they say.  If only you were nothing but bones."
-Shrill by Lindy West

"We each get just a few years to be perfect.  That's what I'd been sold.  To be young and smooth and decorative and collectible.  I was missing my window, I could feel it pulling at my navel (my obsessively hidden, hated navel), and I scrabbled, desperate and frantic.  Deep down, in my honest places, I knew it was already gone - I had stretch marks and cellulite long before twenty - but they tell you that if you hate yourself hard enough, you can grab a tail feather or two of perfection."
-Shrill by Lindy West

"So, what do you do when you're too big, in a world where bigness is cast not only as aesthetically objectionable, but also as a moral failing?  You fold yourself up like origami, you make yourself smaller in other ways, you take up less space with your personality, since you can't with your body.  You diet.  You starve, you run till you taste blood in your throat, you count out your almonds, you try to buy back your humanity with pounds of flesh."
-Shrill by Lindy West

"A void opens up in this room - opens up in my chest - from the lack of you."
-Ivory and Bone by Julie Eshbaugh

"It is a dangerous thing to unbelieve something only because it frightens you."
-Heartless by Marissa Meyer

"But why should what I weigh affect other people?  I mean, unless I'm sitting on them, who cares?"
-Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

"I'm sorry, did you mean my physical weight or my spiritual weight?"
-Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

"But inside my chest, my heart is clenching and unclenching and skipping beats and fluttering like it's about to burst its way out of there and fly around this car.  I fix a smile on my face and stare out the window and think, Oh, heart, you traitor." 
-Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

"This is one of those times when I can feel myself taking up too much space."
-Holding Up the Universe by Jennifer Niven

"Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be."
-Clementine Paddleford

"Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination."
-Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Before I can even answer her, Millie starts up again.  'Do you ever sense a little silver sliver of sadness around your happy memories?'

'I'm not sure what you mean...'

'I do.  There's something about remembering that just isn't the same as the real thing.  No matter how happy it makes you feel.  When you remember something, you have to recognize that the moment will never happen again."
-Something in Between by Melissa de la Cruz

"I didn't know what to call it, what was happening between us, but I liked it.  It felt silly and fragile and good."
-Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

"The truth is, reasons are hard.  I'm standing on a whole stack of them right now, with barely a notion of how I got up here."
-Mosquitoland by David Arnold

"But I don't like it, okay?  I don't like how everything is changing.  It's like when you're a kid, you think that things like the holidays are meant to show you how things always stay the same, how you have the same celebration year after year, and that's why it's so special.  But the older you get, the more you realize that, yes, there are all these things that link you to the past, and you're using the same words and singing the same songs that have always been there for you, but each time, things have shifted, and you have to deal with that shift.  Because maybe you don't notice it every single day.  Maybe it's only on days like this."
-Twelve Days of Dash and Lily by David Leviathan

"And I knew that there was something about me that Mrs. Quintana saw and loved.  And even though I felt it was a beautiful thing, I also felt it was a weight.  Not that she meant it to be a weight.  But love was always something heavy for me.  Something I had to carry."
-Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz

"I do not turn away.  I try to be a fact, not a feeling."
-Another Day by David Leviathan

"And I wanted her wants intact."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"It was a constant push and pull: when I was here, I wanted to be anywhere else; when I was anywhere else, I wanted to be here.  Wherever I was, I felt guilty for not being in the other place."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"As she continued, hair splashing, lips crashing, heart singing, she spoke of the joys of fiction, and about sinking into fiction, and I imagined sinking with her.  I wanted to be part of all things if they were her things."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"Quiet observers tent to be loud thinkers."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"Parents forget what it's like to change so quickly, to feel completely yourself one minute, then the next minute it's like a total stranger wrapped themselves in your skin.  But not Mom.  Mom was like a mood meteorologist, always ahead of the curve, seemingly unfazed by my adolescent whims."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"Our past tenses last way longer than our present ones."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"God.  The longer I was a person, the less I wanted to be one."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"I felt full of fiery things, and icy things too, things that bubbled and boiled and popped, things that begged for liberation."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"You and Victor are my North, South, East, and West.  You are my Due Everywhere.  How could I ever be lost?"
-Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden

"I'd been thinking a lot about love recently and how it wasn't contingent on the person receiving it; it was contingent on the person giving it."
-Kids of Appetite by David Arnold

"She's going to say my name like that again, and I am going to hear music in it I shouldn't hear."
-Another Day by David Leviathan

"Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression. 

Depression is like a heaviness that you can't ever escape.  It crushes down on you, making even the smallest things like tying your shoes or chewing on toast seem like a twenty-mile hike uphill.  Depression is a party of you; it's in your bones and your blood.  If I know anything about it, this is what I know: It's impossible to escape."
-My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga

"She'd never understood how other parents just lost it.  Now she did; children betrayed their parents by becoming their own people."
-The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

"'Besides,' Gabe finished, 'why would she have wings if she wasn't meant to fly?'"
-The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

"There is was again.  Fate.  As a child, that word was often my only companion.  It whispered to me from dark corners during lonely nights.  It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon.  Fate.  Both my anguish and my solace.  My escort and my cage."
-The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

"But more than that, she learned how to worry.  She, who'd always thought love's only companion was sorrow, learned that worry came hand in hand with love."
-The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

"For a very long time, Viviane and Jack lived in that world people inhabit before love.  Some people called that place friendship; others called it confusing.  Viviane found it a pleasant place with an altitude that only occasionally made her nauseous."
-The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton

"'So why does our writing matter, again?' they ask. 
Because of the spirit, I say.  Because of the heart.  Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation.  They depend and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.  When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored.  We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.  It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea.  You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship." 
-Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

"There's a word in Portuguese that my dad wrote about in one of his books: saudade.  It's the sadness you feel for something that isn't gone yet, but will be.  The sadness of lost causes.  The sadness of being alive."
-Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach

"Why Nathaniel?  As in why did I fall in love with him?"  I nodded.  "Oh, I don't know.  Why does anyone fall in love with anyone?  I don't believe we each have some single special person waiting for us out there, if that's what you're getting at.  I've been in love too many times over the years to buy into that old canard.  It's more a question of timing, you know?  As if we all have these elaborate locks inside our hearts that are constantly changing shape, and every once in a while, someone happens along with the perfect key.  Love is nothing more than a fortuitous collision of circumstances.  And then you discover you've ended up spending fifty years with someone."
-Thanks for the Trouble by Tommy Wallach

"I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life.  If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed.  Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it, and above all become passionate about it.  Lukewarm is no good."
-Roald Dahl

“Now, every time...”

“Now, every time I witness a strong person, I want to know: What dark did you conquer in your story? 

Mountains do not rise without earthquakes.”

- Katherine MacKenett

“We are cleaved together...”

“We are cleaved together - we are cleaved apart - everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away.”- The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

“Sometimes you’ve resigned yourself..”

“Sometimes you’ve resigned yourself to living your life in the shadow of what might have been.  Looking up at happiness from some low place.  You’ve finally accepted that your life isn’t on the unbroken upward trajectory it feels like it’ll be when you’re a kid, when you assume every year willbe better than the one before.  You’ve said to yourself, This is all there is for me, and then something, someone, comes along and says, Hold on,there’s more.  

Maybe life isn’t about avoiding pain at all costs.  Maybe it’s about having one or two people who have signed up for the messy job of being your salvation, who make your life bigger.”

- Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee by Jeff Zentner