"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

"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

"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

"'We can't ever be together,' he finished.  'But I always want to know you, even if we're in the same room and you're just saying hi to me over and over again, I'll be perfectly happy.  I'll always want to be sitting across from you.'"
-More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

"Adults lie.  They lie about how they love children equally.  They never do.  They love children differently, and the difference is so broad that equality is not even in the picture."
-A World Without You by Beth Revis

"But it wasn't anything like the fear that accompanied my drowning nightmare - harrowing and visceral.  No, this fear made me feel fizzy.  Hopeful. 

In fact, this fear felt like waking up to discover I am still here."
-The Start of Me and You by Emery Lord

"That I might always be a little bit vicious or restless.  That I might crave peace, but never a cage of comfort."
-A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas

"'Tell you what,' said Victor.  'You remember me, and I'll remember you, and that way we won't be forgotten.'"
-Vicious by V.E. Schwab

"Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human."
-Vicious by V.E. Schwab

"It had taken all his control to hide the anger, the desire to pen over Eli's life, and rewrite it into his."
-Vicious by V.E. Schwab

"Victor wondered about lots of things.  He wondered about himself (whether he was broken, or special, or better, or worse) and about other people (whether they were all really as stupid as they seemed).  He wondered about Angie - what would happen if he told her how he felt, what it would be like if she chose him.  He wondered about life, and people, and science, and magic, and God, and whether he believed in any of them." 
-Vicious by V. E. Schwab  

"He meets me where I am, and because of the downward tilt of the driveway, we are toe to toe, nose to nose.  'Willowdean Opal Dickson, you are beautiful.  Fuck anyone who's ever made you feel anything less.'  His chest heaves.  'When I close my eyes, I see you.  I can talk to you.  In a way I never have with anyone else.'

Beautiful, he says.  Fat, I think.  But can't I be both at the same time?
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"'Why?'  I drop my bag in the driveway.  'Why do you want to be with this?'  I wave my arm up and down the length of my body.  Immediately, I hate myself for this.  The only person making this about my body is me." 
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy