"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"'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 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

"And in our house, we enjoyed our togetherness but we enjoyed our apartness, too." 
-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

"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

"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

"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