46 Of The Most Beautiful Sentences In YA Literature
1. “You could rattle the stars. You could do anything, if you only dared. And deep down, you know it too, and that’s what scares you the most.”
—Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
2. “Because sometimes chance and circumstance can seem like the most appalling injustice, but we just have to adapt. That’s all we can do.”
—Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods
3. “I can’t seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good.”
—John Corey Whaley, Where Things Come Back
4. “Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.”
―Christopher Paolini, Eragon
5. “Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned; leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can’t do that until your life has grown roots.”
—John Green, Paper Towns
6. “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”
―J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
7. “I’m done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.”
—Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
8. “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
9. “The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.”
—Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
10. “Eleanor was right. 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
11. “Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.”
—Natalie Babbit, Tuck Everlasting
12. “Just because we’ve been … dealt a certain hand … it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose to rise above — to conquer the boundaries of a destiny that none of us wanted.”
—Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
13. “Some walks you have to take alone.”
—Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
14. “That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”
—John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
15. “We believe in the wrong things. That’s what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We’re just so damn good at reading them wrong.”
—Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
16. “Why would you be given wings if you weren’t meant to fly?”
—Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
17. “Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
18. “It’s just that…I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It’s the universe’s way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It’s how life is.”
—Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
19. “The universe is bigger than anything that can fit into your mind.”
—Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
20. “I try to think about how it all works. At school dances, I sit in the background, and I tap my toe, and I wonder how many couples will dance to ‘their song.’ In the hallways, I see the girls wearing the guys’ jackets, and I think about the idea of property. And I wonder if anyone is really happy. I hope they are. I really hope they are.”
—Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
21. “Things were rough all over but it was better that way. That way, you could tell the other guy was human too.”
—S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
22. “What if evil doesn’t really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except our own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?”
—Libba Bray, Rebel Angels
23. “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
24. “It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”
—Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
25. “I can tell you that the end of a life is the sum of the love that was lived in it, that whatever you think you have sworn, being here at the end of Jem’s life is not what is important. It was being here for every other moment.”
—Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
26. “Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”
—Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle In Time
27. “Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it”
—Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper
28. “People never really died. They only went on to a better place, to wait a while for their loved ones to join them. And then once more they went back to the world, in the same way they had arrived the first time around.”
―V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic
29. “Goodbye, I say, goodbye, as I disappear little by little into the middle of the middle of my own spectacular now.”
—Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now
30. “But if I’m it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I’m going to let the story end this way…Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.”
—Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
31. “The words were on their way, and when they arrived, she would hold them in her hands like clouds, and she would ring them out like the rain.”
—Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
32. “Child, no one is ever ready for anything. I would never doom you to that. What sort of adventureless life would that be?”
—Alethea Kontis, Enchanted
33. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
34. “Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.”
―Jandy Nelson, I’ll Give You the Sun
35. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: We all want everything to be okay. We don’t even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.”
—David Levithan, Every Day
36. “Doubt everything at least once. What you decide to keep, you’ll be able to be confident of. And what you decide to ditch, you will replace with what your instincts tell you is true.”
―Amy Plum, After the End
37. “Just as a river by night shines with the reflected light of the moon, so too do you shine with the light of your family, your people, and your God. So you are never far from home, never alone, wherever you go.”
—Karen Cushman, Catherine Called Birdy
38. “You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it 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
39. “There’s no shame in fear, my father told me, what matters is how we face it.”
—George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
40. “I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.”
—Lauren Oliver, Delirium
41. “We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth being cold for that.”
—Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
42. “It’s a lot easier to be lost than found. It’s the reason we’re always searching and rarely discovered—so many locks not enough keys.”
―Sarah Dessen, Lock and Key
43. “On that cold night in January it all slipped into place for me and she became my everything and my everyone. My music, my sun, my words, my logic, my confusion, my flaw.”
—Julie Murphy, Side Effects May Vary
44. “Hope? Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.”
—Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone
45. “[She] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.”
—Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword
46. “Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels, but old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.”
—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
