Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

★★★★

"Ellen had said that her mother was afraid of the ocean, that it was too cold and too big.  The sky was, too, thought Annemarie.  The whole world was: too cold, too big.  And too cruel."

Ironman by Chris Crutcher

★★★

"You know, Bo, there is a feeling, in that instant following some life-changing tragedy, that you can actually step back over that silver of time and stop the horror from coming.  But that feeling is a lie, because in the tiniest microminisecond after any event occurs, it is as safe in history as Julius Caesar.  Data in the universal computer is backed up as it happens."

The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoniette by Carolly Erickson

★★

"I have never treasured any woman the way I treasure you now, this moment.  You are all I think of, all I want."

Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides

★★★★★

"Can you see me?  All of me?  Probably not.  No one ever really has."

Resistance by Anita Shreve

★★★★

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

★★★★

"He didn't know, of course.  Not really.  And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it.  For I knew what he meant.  We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dementions of grief is common to us all.  'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did."

The Pact by Jodi Picoult

★★★★

" 'I love you,' he whispered, and that was the moment he knew what he was going to do.  When you loved someone, you put their needs before your own.  No matter how inconceivable those needs were; no matter how fucked up; no matter how much it made you feel like you were ripping yourself into pieces."

Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund

★★★★★

"Where we choose to be, where we choose to be - we have the power to determine that in our lives.  We cannot reel time backward or forward, but we can take ourselves to the place that defines our being."