"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

"It's not that I feel unworthy.  I deserve my happy ending.  But what if, for me, Bo is a high point and, for him, I'm a lapse in judgement?"
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"Because for the first time in my life, I fit.  I fit without any question."
-Dumplin' by Julie Murphy

"My stomach starts to burn.  Crushes are so stupidly physical sometimes, like colds."
-Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

"This version is a hundred feet taller and has arms.  Obviously he had arms before, but not like this.  Not like you had to think about them in italics."
-The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

"I could feel my pulse fluttering beneath his fingertips, and I had to remind myself that I knew how to breathe, that I'd been doing it my whole life."
-The Unexpected Everything by Morgan Matson

"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