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51 Beautiful YA Book Quotes To Inspire and Motivate Your Life

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Kelly Jensen

Editor

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.

There are some quotes from YA books we’re all familiar with. There are the short YA book quotes which become iconic with specific books or cultural moments—think “Okay? Okay,” from John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars or “May the odds be ever in your favor” from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games or even “Stay Gold, Ponyboy” from S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. But there is a whole world of YA book quotes out there, and even for readers who aren’t familiar with YA fiction, these YA book quotes will inspire, encourage, and motivate you to live your best life. All of these quotes are from YA books, rather than quotes from speeches, essays, or other non-book outlets by young adult authors.

 

YA book quotes to encourage, inspire, and motivate you.

 

Find below 51 YA book quotes in the categories of relationships, bravery, self-acceptance, and more. And, as always, feel free to add your own favorite YA book quotes in the comments. Let’s make this a collection of great words from the world of young adult literature.

 

YA Book Quotes About Love, Relationships, and People

1. “If you have two friends in your lifetime, you’re lucky. If you have one good friend, you’re more than lucky.” —from That Was Then, This Is Now by S.E. Hinton

 

2. “You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you’ll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk.” —from They Both Die At The End by Adam Silvera

 

3. “People really are like houses with vast rooms and tiny windows. And maybe it’s a good thing, the way we never stop surprising each other.” —from Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

 

 

4. “I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people—to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it’s the effect or vice versa.”  —from Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

 

5. “I think that maybe forgiveness is like change—it comes in small steps.” —from The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

 

6. “Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places.” —from Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore

 

7. “I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed.” —from This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen

 

8. “Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims. Just you as you.” —from All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

 

YA Book Quotes On Speaking Up and Using Your Voice

9. “When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.You’d be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It’s the saddest thing I know.” —from Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

 

 

10. “Books are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them.” —from Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi

 

11. “It doesn’t matter how big the body, it’s what you do with it.” —from The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

 

12. “If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system. That’s much more powerful than rebelling outside the system.” —from Legend by Marie Lu

 

13. “We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither.” —from These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly

 

14. “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.” —from Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

 

15. “The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe.” —from Eragon by Christopher Paolini

 

16. “I feel like I need to speak out, because if no one speaks out, if no one says, this is me, this is what I believe in, and this is why I’m different, and this is why that’s okay, then what’s the point? What’s the point of living in this beautiful, great melting pot where everyone can dare be anything they want to be?” —from When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

 

YA Book Quotes On Fear and Strength

17. “Brave doesn’t mean you’re not scared. It means you go on even though you’re scared.” —from The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

 

18. “Making a decision isn’t about knowing every potential consequence. It’s about knowing what you want and chasing a path that takes you in that direction” —from Huntress by Malinda Lo

 

 

19. “The funny thing about armor is that it doesn’t just keep other people out. It keeps us in. We build it up around us, not realizing that we’re trapping ourselves.” —from The Unbound by Victoria Schwab

 

20. “Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.” —from Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume

 

21. “We can’t know what’s going to happen. We can just try to figure it out as we go along.” —from Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour by Morgan Matson

 

22. “Fear is only your enemy if you allow it to be.” —from An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

 

23. “Fear doesn’t shut you down; it wakes you up” —from Divergent by Veronica Roth

 

24. “I’ve seen most of what there is to be afraid of in this world, and to tell you the truth, the worst of them are the ones that make you afraid in the
light. The things that your eyes see plainly and can’t forget are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination. Imagination has a poor memory; it slinks away and goes blurry. Eyes remember for much longer.” —from Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

 

YA Book Quotes On Being Yourself and Believing In Yourself

25. “We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That’s why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.”  —from White Cat by Holly Black

 

26. “My life is not packaged,
Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged
Edges that cut even my friends.”  —from Street Love by Walter Dean Myers

 

27. “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” —from An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

 

28. “Just because you can’t experience everything doesn’t mean you shouldn’t experience anything.” —from Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

 

 

29. “Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on.” —from If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson

 

30. “The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.” —from UnWholly by Neal Schusterman

 

31. “I think you gotta be who you want to be until you feel like you are whoever it is you’re trying to become. Sometimes half of doing something is pretending that you can.” —from Dumplin‘ by Julie Murphy

 

32. “Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose.” —from We Are The Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

 

33. “I believed, and still believe, that you can build your dreams brick by brick. That you can accomplish anything with persistence.” —from I Believe In A Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo

 

34. “Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.”  —from Just One Day by Gayle Forman

 

35. “Take care not to listen to anyone who tells you what you can and can’t be in life.” —from The Girl Who Could Silence The Wind by Meg Medina

 

 

Funny Quotes From YA Books

 

36. “You should eat a waffle. You can’t be sad if you eat a waffle” —from ttfn by Lauren Myracle

 

37. “Do you ever think if people heard our conversations they’d lock us up?” —from Jeremy Fink and The Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass

 

38. “What makes big boobs and perkiness so attractive to boys? I mean, really. Two round, mounds of fat and a fake smile. Yeah, winning attributes.” —from Oh My Goth by Gena Showalter

 

 

39. “Ah coffee. The sweet balm by which we shall accomplish today’s tasks.” —from Ironside by Holly Black

 

40. “I mean, really. Who sends their kid to boarding school? It’s so Hogwarts. Only mine doesn’t have cute boy wizards or magic candy or flying lessons.” —from Anna and The French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

 

41. “”A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
I really hate this expression. I bet fish would totally want bicycles.” —from Princess On The Brink by Meg Cabot

 

42. “Don’t get stabbed. It makes everything awkward.” —from The Madness Underneath by Maureen Johnson

 

YA Quotes About Reading

 

43. “She delighted in the smell of the ink, the rough feel of the paper between her fingers, the rustle of sweet pages, the shapes of letters before her eyes.”  —from My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows

 

44. “It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they’d read me cover to cover as I’d read them.” —from Noteworthy by Riley Redgate

 

45. “It’s amazing how the more you read, the less you know.” —from Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

 

46. “Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.” —from Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

 

47. “When I read, I feel emotion all on my own. Emotion no living person is making me feel.” —from Pivot Point by Kasie West

 

48. “[T]he books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us.” —from Nevernight by Jay Kristoff

 

 

49. “No one with a book is ever alone, even in the darkest moments.” —from Ash and Quill by Rachel Caine

 

50. “Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.” —from Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas

 

51. “Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves.” —from The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma

 

If you’d like even more inspiring words beyond these YA book quotes, check out this round-up of book quotes for every month of the year, excellent lines from Anne of Green Gables, and wisdom from Judy Blume.