“Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint-it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”
–Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
“I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.”
–Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
“My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war with a predetermined winner.”
–John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
“She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
–Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park
“And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn’t matter.”
–Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
“Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out, like the rain.”
–Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
“But everything evened out eventually, didn’t it – every wave subsided, lapsed back into the ocean, returning, giving them time to put themselves back together again. He was her moon. He balanced out her tides.”
–Katie Neipris, The Inconvenient Process of Falling
“You don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”
–John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
“You weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.”
–Scott Westerfeld, Uglies
“When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You’d be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It’s the saddest thing I know.”
–Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
“Becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it.”
–Veronica Roth, Divergent
“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
–John Green, Looking For Alaska
“You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.”
–Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
“I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.”
–Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby
“This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be.”
–David Levithan, Every Day 
