Who says wisdom can’t come wrapped in a youthful package? Forget the age label; YA books are for everyone who’s ever had a heartbeat! Whether you’re in for a nostalgic trip down memory lane or a newcomer to the genre, my roundup of 100+ quotes from Young Adult books will make you laugh, cry, and maybe even cringe a little (in a good way!). I’ve got it all – the dizzying highs of first love, the gut-punch of heartbreak, and those oh-so-relatable growing pains. Let’s get quoting!
1. “What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give
2. “I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”
― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
3. “You don’t know what goes on in anyone’s life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can’t be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person’s life, you’re messing with their entire life. Everything. . . affects everything.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why
4. “We are all someone’s monster.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows
5. “I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren’t all that different.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent
6. “Keep in mind that many people have died for their beliefs; it’s actually quite common. The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe.”
― Christopher Paolini, Eragon
7. “Sometimes when we say things, we hear silence. Or only echoes. Like screaming from inside. And that’s really lonely. But that only happens when we weren’t really listening. It means we weren’t ready to listen yet. Because every time we speak, there is a voice. There is the world that answers back.”
― Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the Dead
8. “I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders
9. “Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall
10. “The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
11. “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
12. “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 & Bone
13. “Sometimes it seems like everyone knows who I am except me.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda
14. “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
15. “When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
16. “Always be a little kinder than you have to.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars
17. “Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.”
― David Levithan, Every Day
18. “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
19. “There is no shame in not knowing something. The shame is in not being willing to learn.”
― Alison Croggon, The Naming
20. “We accept the love we think we deserve.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
21. “Heart and head are contrary historians.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
22. “I’m done with those; regrets are an excuse for people who have failed.”
― Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
23. “The worst part of holding the memories is not the pain. It’s the loneliness of it. Memories need to be shared.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver
24. “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
25. “You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
26. “The smarter you are, the more things can scare you.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
27. “Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
28. “Everyone makes choices in life. Some bad, some good. It’s called living, and if you want to bow out, then go right ahead. But don’t do it halfway. Don’t linger in whiner’s limbo.”
― Maria V. Snyder, Poison Study
29. “Threats are the last resort of a man with no vocabulary.”
― Tamora Pierce, Lady Knight
30. “Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.”
― Pierce Brown, Golden Son
31. “The problem with resolutions is they’re only as solid as the person making them.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Crank
32. “Hope can be bruised and battered. It can be forced underground and even rendered unconscious, but hope cannot be killed.”
― Neal Shusterman, UnSouled
33. “Without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go
34. “The darkest minds tend to hide behind the most unlikely faces.”
― Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds
35. “The world is almost peaceful when you stop trying to understand it.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X
36. “Broken people don’t hide from their monsters. Broken people let themselves be eaten.”
― Francesca Zappia, Eliza and Her Monsters
37. “There are two kinds of guilt. The kind that’s a burden and the kind that gives you purpose. Let your guilt be your fuel. Let it remind you of who you want to be. Draw a line in your mind. Never cross it again. You have a soul. It’s damaged but it’s there. Don’t let them take it from you.”
― Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
38. “Life’s harder, the deeper you feel things.”
― John Marsden, The Dead of Night
39. “Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.”
― Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
40. “People don’t change. They just get better at hiding who they really are.”
― Courtney Summers, Sadie
41. “To find a happy ending with someone else, first you have to find it alone.”
― Soman Chainani, The Last Ever After
42. “Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that’s not how it works. A human’s life is a beautiful mess.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Elsewhere
43. “The worst kind of lie – the kind shrouded in good intentions. The kind cowards use to justify their weakness.”
― Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn
44. “No kindness is ever wasted, nor can we ever tell how much good may come of it.”
― Nancy Farmer, The Sea of Trolls
45. “Understand your limitations so you can overcome them.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
46. “The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
47. “Some things you can never leave behind. They don’t belong to the past. They belong to you.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
48. “What an unchallenging life it would be if we always got things right on the first go.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
49. “Just remember, when you’re floating up and up in your bubble, that bubbles have a habit of bursting. The higher you climb, the further you have to fall.”
― Malorie Blackman, Noughts & Crosses
50. “Sometimes bad things need to be reminded they’re not the only ones who can bite.”
― Eliza Crewe, Cracked
51. “Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.”
― Brodi Ashton, Everneath
52. “The more one knows, the sooner one grows old.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower
53. “We can’t begin to learn until we admit how much we don’t know.”
― Claudia Gray, A Thousand Pieces of You
54. “I am stronger than my trials.”
― Dan Wells, Partials
55. “Ghosts don’t haunt people – their memories do.”
― Alexandra Bracken, Never Fade
56. “None of us are saints. We can all do better.”
― Marie Lu, The Midnight Star
57. “Lies are comforting. Truth is painful.”
― Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing
58. “The truth doesn’t always make a good story, does it?”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians
59. “We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”
― J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
60. “Those who know what it’s like in the dark will do anything to stay in the light.”
― Victoria Aveyard, King’s Cage
61. “It must be so easy to judge the decisions of someone else when you sit back and do nothing.”
― Scott Sigler, Alive
62. “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
63. “It’s against the rules of humanity to believe there is nothing we can do.”
― Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock
64. “Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything’s possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.”
― Marie Lu, Legend
65. “Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with.”
― Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage
66. “Often it was the most unlikely people who found within themselves a spark of something greater. It was probably always there, but most people are never tested, and they go through their whole lives without ever knowing that when things are at their worst, they are at their best.”
― Jonathan Maberry, Rot & Ruin
67. “When we’re in pain, people are too quick to say, Get over it, move on, it’s not that bad. But we don’t get over grief by denying it. We have to feel it. We have to give it its due. Sometimes that means doing the exact opposite of “moving on.” We have to dive down to the very depths of our sorrow, relive every terrible moment, and endure the torture of asking what could have been – and what will now be. We have to bleed out before our hearts can start beating again.”
― Claudia Gray, A Million Worlds with You
68. “The thing about reason is that there’s a geometry to it. It travels in a straight line, so that slightly different beginnings can lead you to wildly divergent endpoints.”
― Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale
69. “Even in the darkest and most cruel person, there is still a kernel of good. And within the most perfect champion, there is darkness. The question is, will one give in to the dark or the light? It’s something we decide with every choice we make, every day that we exist. What might not be evil to you could be evil to someone else. Knowing this makes us powerful even without magic.”
― Morgan Rhodes, Falling Kingdoms
70. “Skies save me from the men in my life and all the things they think they know.”
― Sabaa Tahir, A Reaper at the Gates
71. “People who live in glass houses should shut the f―k up.”
― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
71. “Even strength must bow to wisdom sometimes.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
72. “Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess
73. “Libraries were full of ideas – perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass
74. “Hesitation is the death of advantage.”
― Victoria Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic
75. “I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
76. “There is no kindness in offering false hope.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted
77. “We need to face what we are. All of what we are, especially the parts that hurt.”
― Sara Raasch, Ice Like Fire
78. “Doors are for people with no imagination.”
― Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant
79. “You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games
80. “Maybe that was how it was with all first loves. They own a little piece of your heart, always.”
― Jenny Han, We’ll Always Have Summer
81. “Words can lie. See beyond them.”
― Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
82. “Maybe it’s better to have gotten it right and been happy for one day instead of living a lifetime of wrongs.”
― Adam Silvera, They Both Die at the End
83. “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
84. “Books have to be heavy because the whole world’s inside them.”
― Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
85. “A thousand moments that I had just taken for granted – mostly because I had assumed that there would be a thousand more.”
― Morgan Matson, Second Chance Summer
86. “What you think you know about a person is only a fraction of the story.”
― Gavin Extence, The Universe Versus Alex Woods
87. “Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true.”
― Emily X.R. Pan, The Astonishing Color of After
88. “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
89. “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 Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
90. “That’s the trouble with loving a wild thing: You’re always left watching the door.”
― Edith Pattou, East
91. “Love, as most know, follows its own timeline. Disregarding our intentions or well rehearsed plans.”
― Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
92. “I believe in deeds, not words.”
― Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure
93. “Confidence is ignorance. If you’re feeling cocky, it’s because there’s something you don’t know.”
― Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl
94. “The main thing to do is pay attention. Pay close attention to everything, notice what no one else notices. Then you’ll know what no one else knows, and that’s always useful.”
― Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember
95. “Vanity is a factor, but it is more a question of control. It is easier to trick others into perceiving you as beautiful if you can convince yourself you are beautiful. But mirrors have an uncanny way of telling the truth.”
― Marissa Meyer, Cinder
96. “Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?”
― Garth Nix, Sabriel
97. “Life, too, is senseless unless you know who you are, what you want, and which way the wind blows.”
― Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game
98. “True love is usually the most inconvenient kind.”
― Kiera Cass, The Selection
99. “Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star
100. “All of us heal in time. The strongest are born again. We only keep the scars we choose to keep.”
― Alethea Kontis, Enchanted
101. “You’re nobody’s rainbow. You’re nobody’s princess. You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”
― Seanan Mcguire, Every Heart a Doorway
102. “Clever is as clever does.”
― Tony DiTerlizzi & Holly Black, Lucinda’s Secret
103. “I think there should be a rule that everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their lives.”
― R.J. Palacio, Wonder
104. “It’s not a big thing, but I guess it’s true – big things are often just small things that are noticed.”
― Markus Zusak, I Am the Messenger
105. “Some things you can never leave behind. They don’t belong to the past. They belong to you.”
― Rick Yancey, The 5th Wave
106. “Horrible things have happened to us, are still happening to us, will happen every day for the rest of our lives, probably. What defines us is not our ability to never let them break us – what defines us is not letting them own us.”
― Sara Raasch, Ice Like Fire
107. “I always believed a man is what he does, not what others say.”
― Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn
108. “One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries
109. “It’s pointless to believe what you see, if you only see what you believe.”
― Marie Lu, The Young Elites
110. “After a lifetime of darkness, I want to leave something behind that is made of light.”
― Marie Lu, The Midnight Star
111. “I hope you will find your place, wherever you are. Even in the silence, I hope you will find the words you need to share.”
― Rebecca Ross, Divine Rivals
112. “So often we only do what we think is expected of us, when we are capable of so much more.”
― Cynthia Hand, Unearthly
113. “The trouble with anger is, it gets hold of you. And then you aren’t the master of yourself anymore. Anger is. And when anger is the boss, you get unintended consequences.”
― Jeanne Duprau, The City of Ember
And that’s a wrap! Feel free to comment, share and don’t forget to check out our other collections for more quote goodness: