Disclaimer: Included in this list of quotes from books are links to the books’ Amazon listings in case you’d like to purchase. I’m an Amazon affiliate and earn a small percentage from qualifying purchases. As with all books on my blog, please check parental guidelines and trigger warnings before reading.

Seven great literary fiction quotes from books

…about love, life, sleep, partying, motherhood and more.

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He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other: the more he longed for her, the more disappointed he felt, the more he longed.

— Cleopatra and Frankenstein. See my review here, and you can purchase the book here.

‘If you want to look good you have to fight for it in this ugly world,’ my mother had always said. But I’d fought–and I still looked bad.

It became easy and comforting to think of myself as a sick person. It was a great solution, I enjoyed the idea of something being wrong with me…Once I started diagnosing myself I couldn’t stop. Promiscuity, shoplifting, evil behavior…

— Nothing Special. See my review here. You can purchase the book here

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine , safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.

— My Year of Rest and Relaxation. See my analysis here and more books like it here. You can also purchase the book here

The Herculean effort of the last years, all the disappointments, the worry that she was not, despite everything she had sacrificed, a good mother, the anxiety that she would never return to her art and that this was now her lot in life, motherhood and nothing more, she felt all of it thudding through her and cried and cried, like a heartsick teen she cried.

— Nightbitch. See my Nightbitch review here and purchase it here

I always hated this aspect of a party, pinnacling around and latching onto new clusters like a barnacle searching for a hull.

— Apartment. See my review here and you can purchase the book here.

That was the first time I ever saw Suzanne–her black hair marking her, even at a distance, as different, her smile at me direct and assessing. I couldn’t explain it to myself, the wrench I got from looking at her. She seemed as strange and raw as those flowers that bloom in lurid explosion once every five years, the gaudy, prickling tease that was almost the same thing as beauty.

— The Girls. See it on my list of Books to Reread. You can purchase the book here.

He did not love me–he couldn’t, for what Me was there to love? What Me had he ever known? But he had become attached to me, dependent on me. 

I had carefully created a circumstance in which a kind of love could be bred in him, like scientist manipulating lab conditions. I had exhausted his reserves, eroded his natural resistance, and now I was finished.

— Acts of Desperation, see it on my book list here and purchase on Amazon here.

I hope you enjoyed these seven literary fiction quotes from books. If you did, subscribe to my email list on the homepage so I can let you know when my non-fiction book quotes post is up.

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