"I tended to spend too much time with my favorite things, loved them too hard until I wore them down.  After a while, they became more like a shorthand for who I was and less like things I actually enjoyed."
-The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro

"You go through life thinking there's so much you need.  Your favorite jeans and sweater.  The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm.  Your phone and your music and your favorite books.  Mascara.  Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee.  You need you yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker.  You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried.  You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don't want to forget.  You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds.  You need your pillow - it fits the way you sleep.  You need magazines promising self-improvement.  You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots.  Your grade report from the semester you got straight As.  Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains.  You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones.  The dream catcher hanging above your bed.  The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. 

The cab was waiting outside the station. 

The airport, I said, but no sound came out.

'The airport,' I said, and we pulled away. 

You think you need all of it.

Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother."
-We Are Okay by Nina LaCour

"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

"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

"We are the books we read and things we love.  Cal is the ocean and the letters he left.  Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind."
-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