"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

“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

"'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

"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

"He turned towards me, a familiar face but in a really unfamiliar way, his green eyes locked on me.  He moved his head closer to mine, and it felt so right that I'd already close my eyes."
-Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

"I felt him subtly glance me up and down, quick and fluttery like a moth, as if I was some random girl walking by him on the street and we hadn't been best friends for almost seven years.  It gave me a little shiver.  In a good way, I realized."
-Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

"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

"And I stood and breathed their air and considered - as always - things like fragility, danger, luck, imperfection, chance, being kind, being funny, being honest, eyes, hair, bones, the impossible hectic silent epidermis rejuvenating itself, never nervous, always kissable, even when scabbed, even so salty I made it, and I felt so many nights utterly, totally yanked apart by how much I loved these children..."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"There's grief and there's impractical obsession.

I was impractically obsessed with before, I said."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"Everybody passing could comprehend how much I miss her.  How physical my missing is.  I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more.  The whole city is my missing her."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"I remember being scared that something must, surely, go wrong, if we were this happy, her and me, in the early days, when our love was settling into the shape of our lives like cake mixture reaching the corners of the thing as it swells and bakes."
-Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

"But this is darkness.  This is grief and graves."
-The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

"There's nothing scarier than hearing someone you love cry, except imagining a world where that sound stops.  Suddenly I can't breathe.  Can't be here.  There's nothing scarier than loving someone."
-The Love That Split the World by Emily Henry

"I have been made to protect you.  Only in death will I be kept from this oath." 
-Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

"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

"Her throat hurt.  Her chest hurt.  Love hurt.  So why was she happy?"
-The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill

"Those days and nights at the motel, I thought I was afraid of his ghost, but I wasn't.

I was afraid of my loneliness. 

And how I'd been tricked. 

And the way I'd convinced myself of so much: that I wasn't sad, that I wasn't alone.

I was afraid of the man who I'd loved, and how he had been a stranger. 

I was afraid of how I hated him.

How I wanted him back.

Of what was in those boxes and what I might someday discover and the chance I may have lost by leaving them behind. 

I was afraid of the way we'd lived without opening doors.

I was afraid we had never been at home with each other.

I was afraid of the lies I'd told myself.

The lies he'd told me.

I was afraid that our legs under the table had meant nothing.

The folding of laundry had meant nothing.

The tea and the cakes and the songs - all of it - had meant nothing."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour