Young Adult Fiction Quotes

I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go.

~ Lauren Oliver

District 12: Where you can starve to death in safety.

~ Suzanne Collins

Girl scouts didn't teach me what to do with emotionally unstable drunk boys.

~ Stephanie Perkins

Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it. You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself--to get lost. Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry.

~ Lauren Oliver

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?

~ Lauren Oliver

I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.

~ Lauren Oliver

This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.

~ Lauren Oliver

It's not my fault I can't be like you, okay? I don't get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? That's just not how I work. I don't think I can be fixed.

~ Lauren Oliver

And now I realize Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.

~ Lauren Oliver

Mr. Freeman: You are getting better at this, but it's not good enough. This looks like a tree,but it is an average, ordinary, everyday, boring tree. Breathe life into it. Make it bend - trees are flexible, so they don't snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch - perfect trees don't exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.

~ Stephanie Perkins

But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim’s place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love.

~ Suzanne Collins

No, Kramisha, he's not black. He's a killer bird with evil for his Daddy.

~ P.c. Cast

How would you like to star in your very own commercial?I'd rather swim in battery acid.

~ Robin Benway

My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

I was too proud to show him how hurt I was.

~ Kate Le Vann

Nick‘s eyes widened as a total state of befuddled huh possessed him. Was he in theTwilight Zone?

~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

My little sister, Prim, curled up on her side, cocooned in my mother’s body, their cheeks pressed together. In sleep, my mother looks younger, still worn but not so beaten-down. Prim’s face is as fresh as a raindrop, as lovely as the primrose for which she was named. My mother was very beautiful once, too. Or so they tell me.

~ Suzanne Collins

This one is for our crew, but it’s also for all the weird girls and word nerds, for all the in-the-middle wickeds and queers and misfits and hell-raisers.

~ Laura Goode

Only where children gatheris there any real chance of fun.

~ Mignon Mclaughlin

When our eyes made contact it was like being slapped, I just wanted to recoil

~ Kate Le Vann

For a moment, I’m captivated. He’s seducing me with his eyes. A nervous flutter swims through my stomach. I can feel my heartbeat in my throat. Pounding. Constricting. I swallow hard.

~ Lauren Hammond

I have never been reduced to begging somebody to leave me alone, but in your case I’ll make an exception.

~ Tom Upton

I work in a restaurant in an airport in Taiwan. I am eighteen years old and I don’t like my job because everyone gets on planes and leaves. And I want to leave too.

~ Kerem Mermutlu

Angelica rolled the wedding band between her finger and thumb. It's terrifying, to be on the verge of finally getting what you want.

~ Y.s. Lee

Our tragedy is that we forget it might be someone else first.

~ Holly Black

How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound.

~ Curtis Sittenfeld

Yes I am dark, but my eyes are full of stars.

~ Bella James

Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I’m just as evil as he is by keeping my mouth shut. But he told me once that I was different. And I can’t help but hope that me being different is the one thing in this world that can save him from what he fears the most…Himself.

~ Lauren Hammond

I had good intentions once upon a time. Well, September.

~ Claire Hennessy

Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.

~ Margaret Mcmullan

I don’t know if it was just me making things up in my head but after the fear in their eyes had gone what replaced it was like a sad kind of wondering. A wondering of where the old me was hiding. A wondering about where the old me had gone to. It was like I had suddenly been taken over by someone else and they could see the old me had fallen away for good.

~ Kerem Mermutlu

I knew that she couldn’t hear me if she was there. But the sound was enough to grab me, to hold me to hope, and with desperation that I’d never known before I knew that I must find my way back to her.

~ Shawn Kirsten Maravel

Hip-hop is a reflection of your surroundings and an instrument of change. - Esme from Sister Mischief

~ Laura Goode

Something else you should really know about me. When I get nervous, my fingers shake. I’ve noticed this a lot recently. When mother and father argue and their voices are falling around the small family apartment, when their voices are banging against my bedroom door, I can feel my fingers start to move. I tell my fingers to stop and, sometimes, they do. But if I look at my hands closely, once I’ve told them to stop, and I try to focus on keeping them as still as possible, I notice that they are still moving.

~ Kerem Mermutlu

I remember when I was twenty-five,� he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.

~ Daniel Amory

Just try it,� he murmurs, reaching over to cover my hand gently.And I think, Whoa, that’s never happened before!Then: Is he just doing that because he thinks Wyatt is interested?And, finally, this: Who the hell cares?!

~ Rusty Fischer

I'm too old to be ignorant as I am. --Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.

~ Elle Thornton

I know some words floated through my ears, but my mind refused to absorb their meaning. I just shook my head slowly as the wall of pain washed over me, leaving me submerged and broken in the flood.

~ Leslie Deaton

Hurry up, he'll be coming back pretty soon!Lynda spelled with a y Corgill, who was two years behind Dara, Mackenzie, and Jennifer, and had just completed her sophomore year, squeezed the hot glue gun into the door lock of the headmaster's office. Shelby Andrews, her accomplice and the newest resident to be accepted at Wood Rose, stood watch.I see the lights of the truck. Hurry! He's coming back! Are you finished?Lynda gave the metal apparatus one last squeeze, filling the lock with the quick-drying cement glue guaranteed to harden on contact. Finished.In the soft illumination of the crescent moon high overhead, the two girls, barefooted and wearing dark blue pajamas, ran across the lawn crisscrossed by dark, elongated shadows and dampened by night-cooled air to the maintenance shed where they placed the glue gun on the top shelf where it was normally kept. With their task completed, they quickly returned to the dormitory, to the far end from where Ms. Larkins slept, and crawled through the open window. Within minutes they were back in their rooms, in their individual beds, and sound asleep. The sleep of innocent angels.It would soon be light; and Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women would start another day.

~ Barbara Casey