Sway, By Kat Spears

Page 1: "Nothing is good or bad, only thinking makes it so."

Page 7: "That's the way life happens, why you have to be able to see all the angles every time you make a choice. What's true today might not be true tomorrow."

Page 52: "I would like to...know what people are really thinking instead of just what they are saying."

Page 54: "If I like a person, if they have a good heart, that's what makes them beautiful."

Page 83: "There's a lot of hurt in the world. You know, your parents, they're just people. Like you. You think when you get older, you get things all sorted out, or you forget what it felt like to be young. That's not it. You get older, you learn a little about the world, learn what it is to love someone else more than you love yourself..." "The only...things in this world that really matter...[is] the people who love you--and I don't mean your family. Sometimes the people who love you best have no blood relation to you. But in the end, all that will matter to you are the people who really love you..."

Page 89: "Sometimes what we want to be and what the world expects from us are two different things."

Page 136: "With some people it's more about attitude, the way they carry themselves."

Page 242: "You can't go the rest of your life feeling nothing."

Page 253: "Often we believe what we want to think is true..."

Girl Online, By Zoe Sugg

Page 1: "...keeping a diary is a great way of expressing our innermost thoughts."

Page 3: "And maybe one day, when we all realize that we all feel the same, we can all stop pretending to be something we're not."

Page 51: "...sometimes you just have to let people go."

Page 68: "I've decided that I'm not going to try to squeeze myself into a friendship that hurts me anymore."

Page 92: "Sometimes you have to face up to your fears to realize that they aren't actually real."

Page 119: "I've found that life's a whole lot better if you get a little crazy sometimes."

Page 308: "My life can be anything I want it to be--as long as I keep on remembering that it's mine."

Faking Normal, By Courtney C. Stevens

Page 287: "The difference between us isn't the brokenness; it's what we're going to do about it."

Page 297: "Words will lead to voice."

Page 307: "It won't come with a bow on it, but God'll tie it up."

Page 319: "I just hoped you could look at yourself one day and understand what I see when I look at you."

Page 321: "But today is better than yesterday."

On the Road to Find Out, By Rachel Toor

Page 131: "'The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the area, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again... and who at the worst, if she fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.'"

Page 153: "While I appreciate the convenience of electronic versions, I love real books, the smell of them, the way they feel in my hands."

Page 182: "...not caring is the end of a meaningful life. To be cynical about everything is a sad way to live. I don't want to doubt; I want to believe. I want to feel passionate about something." "...it feels good to feel something. And it's something I can share with other people."

Page 183: "...where all of the things that make us different fall away and we can talk for hours... for a few minutes, or an hour,...for that brief amount of time, I feel less alone in the world."

Page 189: "The idea that someone can find his or her talent--and passion--and pursue it to the nth degree..."

Page 190: "...having a passion can help you to live...He gets an opportunity to follow his passion and it takes him places. That [movie] makes me think if I could only figure out what I'm interested in, I could excel at something." "Sometimes I don't know what I think until I talk or write about it." "...in a good book, the author comes to life. You feel like he's talking to you, directly to you, answering your questions and thinking your thoughts... Good books feel personal...Reading is a cure for loneliness."

Page 194: "You don't have to be good yet. You just have to keep at it. Build your strength, increase your endurance..."

Page 195: "It's the act of catching yourself before you fall... Sometimes you might fall... But you brush yourself off and keep going."

Page 220: "There are some stories that are better told while moving forward."

Page 225: "You're a link in a chain. Connect to other people and connect them to each other."

Page 273: "How he'd helped me to refocus my life, to learn to enjoy things and give up being tortured by my own competitiveness."

Page 297: "When I look at the people I most admire, many of them have experienced something that looks like failure. But when you take the time to exercise your powers of vision with more imaginative strength, to peer deep into the curves and shifts of how real lives are lived, you see that what happens when you fail is that you get an opportunity to think harder, to think differently."

Page 299: "...the way to change the world--is for each of us to learn to embrace being wrong."

Page 300: "I want to throw myself into the world and at new things." "I may be a reject. But I am not a failure. At least, not as long as I keep trying."

My Life with the Walter Boys, By Ali Novak

Page 89: "...you can't control everything. Roadblocks, little unexpected bumps, they're all part of living."

Page 100: "...not even noticing how much his words had affected me, softening my aching heart, even if it was only by the slightest bit."

Page 106: "So I built a wall inside my mind to keep back my flood of emotions."

Page 130: "...the kind of person who comes off as crazy because she cares too much?"

Page 131: "Not knowing what's going to happen every once and a while makes things all the more interesting."

Page 132: "All I'm saying is sometimes you're too busy worrying about the future. Sometimes you just gotta feel."

Page 136: "Maybe people should just give hugs. Physical contact says a lot without actually saying anything..."

Page 287: "I had been trying to fit in my world into a small, safe box for so long. But life didn't work like that. It could move in and out of the lines. You couldn't control everything, because it wasn't all meant to be perfect. Sometimes things needed to be messy.."

Page 323: "Life didn't come with instructions."

Page 348: "I feel-- I don't know. Broken, I guess."

Free to Fall, By Lauren Miller

Page 230: "...there will always be competing voices... In your head and in the world. You can't spend your life caught between them."

Page 231: "...if you can't decide, the world will choose for you."

Page 285: "Timshel... It's Hebrew. Steinbeck used it in East of Eden. It means 'thou mayest." The idea being that we all have a choice. To do good, to live well."

Page 319: "To use your gifts for the betterment of mankind. You will be called to a grander, more significant purpose. To see the world not for what it is, but what it could be."

Page 463: "The effervescent pulse of human interaction. People turning to faces instead of screens."

Page 469: "The terrifying but glorious freedom to fall."

Earth Abides, By George R. Stewart

Page 106: "A greater joy, perhaps, saying the little things than saying something much greater." "A friend doubles joys and cuts grief in half..."

Page 111: "The match lived, not when it lay in the box, but merely when it burned--and it could not burn forever. So too with men and women. Not by denying life was life lived."

Page 116: "But each of them had already decided independently that life was not to be lived on the basis of fear." "...her courage seemed to flow out from her and sustain him."

Page 262: "We are afraid, but we do not talk of fear. We have many deep thoughts and doubts, but we do not speak them."

Page 268: "--still you couldn't control what the world does, all of it, pressing in around us."

Page 280: "What you were preparing against--that never happened! All the best-laid plans could not prevent the disaster against which no plans had been laid."