"And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human."
— M.T. Anderson (Thirsty)

"And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time."
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)

"In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time."
— Libba Bray

"What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?"
— Libba Bray (Rebel Angels)

"I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment."
— Libba Bray (The Sweet Far Thing)

"We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds."
— Libba Bray

"'Eve didn't choose to eat the apple. She was tempted by the serpent.'
'Yes,' I argue, thoughts coming out half-formed. 'But...she didn't have to take a bite. She chose to.' "
— Libba Bray

"Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart."
— Scott Westerfeld (So Yesterday)

"You see, freedom has a way of destroying things."
— Scott Westerfeld (Extras)

"Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was."
— Scott Westerfeld (The Uglies Trilogy)

"When you were little, endure your parents’ warnings, then wait for them to leave the room, pry loose protective covers and consider inserting some metal object into an electrical outlet?

Did you wonder if for once you might light up the room?

When you were big enough to cross the street on your own, did you ever wait for a signal, hear the frenzied approach of a fire truck and feel like stepping out in front of it?

Did you wonder just how far that rocket ride might take you?

When you were almost grown, did you ever sit in a bubble bath, perspiration pooling, notice a blow dryer plugged in within easy reach, and think about dropping it into the water?

Did you wonder if the expected rush might somehow fail you?

And now, do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?"
— Ellen Hopkins (Burned)

"Memory is a tenuous thing. . . .

flickering glimpses, blue
and white, like ancient,
decomposing 16mm film.
Happiness escapes
me there, where faces
are vague and yesterday
seems to come tied
up in ribbons of pain.

Happiness? I look for it intead
in today, where memory
is something I can still
touch, still rely on.
I find it in the smiles
of new friends, the hope
blossoming inside.

My happiest memories
have no place in the
past; they are those
I have yet to create."
— Ellen Hopkins (Impulse)

"Before you Bella my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars - points of light and reason. .... And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliance, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no reason for anything."
— Stephenie Meyer

"'Statistically speaking, there's a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I'd rather be partly great than entirely useless.'"
— Neal Shusterman

"'You can't change laws without first changing human nature.'
-Nurse Greta

'You can't change human nature without first changing the law.'
-Nurse Yvonne"
— Neal Shusterman (Unwind)

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to corkboard like a butterfly, but he pin merely went through and away she flew."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal." "
— Deb Caletti (The Nature of Jade)

""All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." "
— James Thurber

"You know . . . a lot of kids at school hate their parents. Some of them got hit. And some of them got caught in the middle of wrong lives. Some of them were trophies for their parents to show the neighbors like ribbons or gold stars. And some of them just wanted to drink in peace."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"You forget all of it anyway. . . You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. . . You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They’re the last to go. And then once you’ve forgotten enough, you love someone else."
— Gabrielle Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac)

"There will be other lives.
There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands.
And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions.
And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles.
And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk.
And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything.
Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess."
— Gabrielle Zevin (Elsewhere)

"Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it “Chops”
because that was the name of his dog
And that’s what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and a gold star
And his mother hung it on the kitchen door
and read it to his aunts
That was the year Father Tracy
took all the kids to the zoo
And he let them sing on the bus
And his little sister was born
with tiny toenails and no hair
And his mother and father kissed a lot
And the girl around the corner sent him a
Valentine signed with a row of X’s
and he had to ask his father what the X’s meant
And his father always tucked him in bed at night
And was always there to do it

Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it “Autumn”
because that was the name of the season
And that’s what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and asked him to write more clearly
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because of its new paint
And the kids told him
that Father Tracy smoked cigars
And left butts on the pews
And sometimes they would burn holes
That was the year his sister got glasses
with thick lenses and black frames
And the girl around the corner laughed
when he asked her to go see Santa Claus
And the kids told him why
his mother and father kissed a lot
And his father never tucked him in bed at night
And his father got mad
when he cried for him to do it.

Once on a paper torn from his notebook
he wrote a poem
And he called it “Innocence: A Question”
because that was the question about his girl
And that’s what it was all about
And his professor gave him an A
and a strange steady look
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because he never showed her
That was the year that Father Tracy died
And he forgot how the end
of the Apostle’s Creed went
And he caught his sister
making out on the back porch
And his mother and father never kissed
or even talked
And the girl around the corner
wore too much makeup
That made him cough when he kissed her
but he kissed her anyway
because that was the thing to do
And at three A.M. he tucked himself to bed
his father snoring soundly

That’s why on the back of a brown paper bag
he tried another poem
And he called it “Absolutely Nothing”
Because that’s what it was really all about
And he gave himself an A
and a slash on each damn wrist
And he hung it on the bathroom door
because this time he didn’t think
he could reach the kitchen."
— Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)

"I wonder if I'll ever have to decide which is worse, life as we're living or no life at all."
— Susan Beth Pfeffer (Life As We Knew It)

"'Because if you take something you're a thief.' She nursed the silence a moment. Downed the balance of her drink and silently signaled for another. 'Sounds simple, but you'd be amazed how many people don't get it. They steal but they call themselves honest. They cheat on their spouses and lovers but they think they're good people. They lie but they'd never call themselves liars. Well, let me tell you something, Todd. . . ." She pointed toward him with her right hand, with her lit cigarette. He leaned away slightly. She looked into the mirror of his eyes and saw herself going too far. 'You are what you do. That's what I'm trying to tell you. What we do defines us. However we behave, conduct our lives . . . that's real. The rest is just a story for publication.'"
— Catherine Ryan Hyde (The Day I Killed James)

"Life is a war, and the families are the armies. Even if you win the war, some will never see you plant the flag."
— R.A. Nelson (Breathe My Name)

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin

"I've realized therapy is incredibly therapeutic."
— Lisa Schroeder (I Heart You, You Haunt Me)

"Guilt reminds me of a stray cat. You chase it away and yet, it comes back when you least expect it. If you let yourself feel pity for it and feed the thing, it parks its ugly, puny, lonely-for-attention butt on your doormat and won't go away. Scat kitty cat, scat. I don't need you sitting around here like that."
— Lisa Schroeder (I Heart You, You Haunt Me)

"You ever watch a football game and get totally into it? Why? It's not a real battle. It's just a game somebody made up. So how can you take it seriously? Or, you ever see a movie that made your heart about jump out of your chest? Or one that made you cry? Why? It wasn't real. You ever look at a photo of food that made your mouth water? Why? You can't eat the picture.

. . . . .

Same thing with water towers and God. I don't have to be a believer to be serious about my religion."
— Pete Hautman (Godless)

"This is the thing about life I've never really understood until now: we try so hard to control it, but bad things happen anyway. The only real control is an anti-control, a letting go."
— R.A. Nelson (Teach Me)

"There is not a name for what I'm feeling. There is no description for it.
To call it yearning would be like calling the ocean water.
Whatever this thing is, it shoves you inside itself and you can't measure its boundaries because they go too far and you don't have enough time. Or you move toward the boundaries and they move away.
There has been an earthquake in my life.
Catastrophic, civilization-ending."
— R.A. Nelson (Teach Me)

"When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."
— John Green

"Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future--you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college."
— John Green (Paper Towns)

"I'm partly somebody else trying to fit in and say the right things and do the right thing and be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing. Sometimes I think we're all trying to be shadows of each other, trying to buy the same records and everything even if we don't like them. Kids are like robots, off an assembly line, and I don't want to be a robot!"
— Beatrice Sparks (Go Ask Alice)

"Thanks to Scoop, I've learned a lot about how the male mind works, and as a result I've been having nightmares for months."
— Yvonne Collins (Girl v. Boy)

"I love mankind, it's people I can't stand."
— Charles M. Schulz

"I can learn to pity a fool as I'm the worst of all
And I can't stop feeling sorry for myself"
— Fall Out Boy

"When I’m home alone I just dance by myself
And you pull my head so close volume goes with the truth
Signing off 'I’m alright in bed but I’m better with a pen'
The kid was alright but it went to his head"
— Fall Out Boy (Fall Out Boy - Infinity on High)

"We're the new face of failure
Prettier and younger but not any better off
Bullet proof loneliness
At best, at best"
— Fall Out Boy

"'What do you think it is to be normal?'
'Why in the world would you want to be?' she says.
'I don't know. I guess that's the problem.'
'I don't think normal is that great.'
'But so many people choose it,' I reply.
'I don't think that's it at all. I think most everyone is normal and some of us, for whatever reason, choose to reject that and wear ruby red slippers or old black hats.'
'Well, why do we choose the hard road?'"
— Patrick Jones (Nailed)

"But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent,
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race.

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life,
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse.

Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem."
— George Gordon Byron

"Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"After you get stung, you can't get unstung
no matter how much you whine about it."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"Sometimes people are beautiful.
Not in looks.
Not in what they say.
Just in what they are."
— Markus Zusak (I Am the Messenger)

"The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)