"It fills me with warmth, running liquid through me, but it won't thaw my mind.  'Why does it have to be, like, based off someone else?  Why don't you just do what you want?'

'What I want is to be around people I care about.'

'Oh.'  I blink at the ceiling once, twice, eyelids getting heavy, eyes gutting fuzzy.  It makes sense when she says it like that." 
-This Adventure Ends by Emma Mills

"Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced.  But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.  The future I thought I was meticulously crafting for years has disappeared, and with it have gone my ideas about the kind of life I'd imagined I was due.

People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much.  I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it.  But it was exploded."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"But you can never tell with shadows.  You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you're crazy, but maybe you're right." 
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism - a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we wold live, what would become of us.  Writers may be particularly susceptible to this outlook, because we are accustomed to the power of authorship.  (Even if you write nonfiction, you still control how the story unfolds.)  Life was complying with my story.

There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"She grew up as I did, with her own bedroom, in a house with a garden and a green lawn, but with a sense that ruin was at a safe distance."
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

"And here I am, still alive, still in the world.  It's my intention to carry on being alive in the world, well, until I die.  At Easter I'll go to Glasgow and see what science fiction fandom is like.  Next June I'll take my exams and pass them, and have qualifications.  Then I'll do A level, as it best works out.  I'll go to university.  I'll live, and read, and have friends, a karass, people to talk to.  I'll grow and change and be myself.  I'll belong to libraries wherever I go.  Maybe eventually I'll belong to libraries on other planets.  I'll speak to varies as I see them and do magic as it comes my way and prevents harm - I'm not going to forget anything.  But I won't use it to cheat or to make my life unreal or go against the pattern.  Things will happen that I can't imagine.  I'll change and grow into a future that will be unimaginably different from the past.  I'll be alive.  I'll be me.  I'll be reading my book.  I'll never drown my books or break my staff.  I'll learn while I live.  Eventually I'll come to death, and die, and I'll go on through death to new life, or even, or whatever unknowable thing is supposed to happen to people when they did.  I'll die and rot and return my cells to life, in the pattern, whatever planet I happen to be on at the time.

That's what life is, and how I intend to live it."
-Among Others by Jo Walton