Stargirl

"This group thing, I said, it's very strong. It's probably an instinct. You find it everywhere, from little groups like families to big ones like a town or school, to really big ones like a whole country. How about really, really big ones, she said, like a planet? Whatever, I said. The point is, in a group everybody acts pretty much the same, that's kind of how the group holds itself together. Everybody? she said. Well, mostly, I said. That's what jails and mental hospitals are for, to keep it that way. You think I should be in jail? she said. I think you should try to be more like the rest of us, I said.

Why? she said.
Because, I said."

Stargirl, p. 137
By Jerry Spinelli
Published 2000

Just Before the War with the Eskimos

"'I never in my life would've thought you could be so small about anything,'" said Selena, who was just angry enough to use the word "small" but not quite brave enough to emphasize it."

Just Before the War with the Eskimos from Nine Stories, p. 42
By J.D. Salinger
Published 1953

The Virgin Suicides

"We could never understand why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to compliment each other, but sometimes, after one of us had read a long portion of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to hug one another and to tell each other how pretty we were. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together."

The Virgin Suicides, p. 43
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Published 1993

The Invisible Circus

"'Tomorrow they'll be so far,' she said. 'And we'll just be here, isn't that weird?' ― always with a wistfulness that betrayed her envy of passengers traveling through the night at high speed. It was a mystery to Phoebe, her sister's envy; why, when she and Faith were so clearly the winners, curled in warm beds, with Grandma's rough starched sheets pulled tight across their chests? Given a choice, who wouldn't choose home?"

The Invisible Circus, p. 206
By Jennifer Egan
Published 1995

Fahrenheit 451

Photo: Here

"Don't give them slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man who tried to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I've tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment."

Fahrenheit 451, p. 61

By Ray Bradbury

Published 1953

The Man of My Dreams

"And yet attending to things that make Hannah unhappy - it's such a natural reflex. It feels so intrinsic, it feels in some ways like who she is. The unflattering observations she makes about other people, the comments that get her in trouble, aren't these truer than small talk and thank-you notes? Worse, but truer. And underneath all the decorum, isn't most everyone judgmental and disappointed? Or is is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them - can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in?"

The Man of My Dreams, p. 139
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Published 2006

The Magicians

Photo: Here and here.

"As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and and one-time variations as there were rules."

The Magicians, p. 149
By Lev Grossman
Published 2009