A beacon to him still, and he resented that, didn’t want it. Couldn’t help it.
- from Acceptance by Jeff VanderMeer

It sounds like a lullaby to me, like all the voices I've ever dreamed of loving me, like it was created, this voice, just for me.
- from Revolution by Deborah Wiles

When you come clean, when you tell the truth, you life a great weight off your shoulders. It’s not that you don’t ever do anything you shouldn’t do ever again, of course not. You’re human, and sometimes the vagaries of life are just too delicious to ignore. Sometimes you are impetuous. Sometimes you are impulsive. And sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes it’s not. It’s just that, when you know you’re caught and you’ve done something you shouldn’t have done, you own up to it.
- from Revolution by Deborah Wiles

...some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
- from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.
- from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

This is how we grow: not up, but out, like trees—swelling to encompass all these stories, the promises and lies and bribes and habits.
- from Rooms by Lauren Oliver

We make reality our own, handle it until it is as soft as pressed butter.
- from Rooms by Lauren Oliver

Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation.
- from Rooms by Lauren Oliver

“Remember when we were kids?” He handed her a hot mug. “And we used to wonder how grown-ups got to be such assholes?”
“Yeah.”
“Now we know.”
“Yeah.”
- from All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders 

Thing about bad judgment? You got to have good judgment to notice you’ve got it.
- from Abaddon’s Gate by James S. A. Corey

I must be old, Pyotr thought to himself, if my son is being kind to me.
- from The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

He knew that insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
- from The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

- from The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

There are roads inside the mind and outside it the mere elaborateness of which shows plainly that, to have got into this, a wrong turning must have been taken way back.
- from The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Orr had a tendency to assume that people knew what they were doing, perhaps because he generally assumed that he did not.
- from The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Because life is robust,
Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,
Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,
O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,
Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,
Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass.
- from New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

People didn't like to feel grateful, because they didn't like the need to feel grateful. So it was not a good feeling no matter which end of it you were on.

- from New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Sometimes courage is carried by a roar--sometimes it is hidden within a wavering voice.

- from Alone by Scott Sigler

Maybe it would be better if we didn't love. If we didn't lose, either. If we didn't get our hearts stomped on, shattered; if we didn't have to patch and repatch until we're like Frankenstein monsters, all sewn together and bound up by who knows what.
- from "Alex" in Delirium Stories by Lauren Oliver

We look at our race, this parade of men and women, and the unbelievable harm and cruelty they do. And we sigh, and we say, "Perhaps our time is past, let the sharks or the cockroaches take over." And then, without knowing why, without even thinking of it, the worst among us does the great thing, the noble deed, that spark of impossible human godliness. And we say, "Perhaps the human race is entitled to a little more sufferance. Let them keep trying to reach the dream." Evil can come from good, and good from evil.
- Captain James T. Kirk in Harlan Ellison's "The City on the Edge of Forever"