It's astounding that a mere combination of 26 letters can evoke such strong emotions and paint powerful pictures. Words can make you feel pain, euphoria, sadness; they can take you to a different world without ever leaving your couch.

The short stories and books mentioned in the following article are fantastic as a whole, but the quotes pulled out pack a strong punch on their own.

1. From Maggie Stiefvater's "Forever"

“It wasn't until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like It is a possibility I will download this album because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance, but possibly in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.”

2. From William Shakespeare's "Henry V"

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother.”

3. Denis Johnson, "Car Crash While Hitchhiking"

“And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

4. From Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The Little Prince"

“‘One day,’ you said to me, ‘I saw the sunset forty-four times!’

And a little later you added:

‘You know-- one loves the sunset when one is so sad...’

‘Were you so sad, then?’ I asked, ‘on the day of the forty-four sunsets?’

But the little prince made no reply.”

5. From Maggie Stiefvater's "Blue Lily, Lily Blue"

“How arrogant we are, Adam thought, to deliver babies who can’t walk or talk or feed themselves. How sure we are that nothing will destroy them before they can take care of themselves.”

6. From Ned Vizzini's "It's Kind of a Funny Story"

“I should be a success and I'm not and other people- younger people- are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting their lives in order. I'm still a nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?”

7. From Stephen Chbosky's "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"

“I just want you to know that you’re very special…and the only reason I’m telling you is that I don’t know if anyone else has.”

8. From Markus Zusak's "The Book Thief"

“I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”

9. From Doris Lessing's "Prisons We Choose to Live Inside"

“We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.”

10. From Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth"

He wanted to shield her from the deterioration that inevitably took place in the course of a marriage, and from the conclusion, he sometimes feared was true: that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start.”

11. From Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”

12. From Virginia Woolf's "The Waves"

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

13. Maggie Stiefvater, "The Dream Thieves"

“Sometimes, Ronan thought Adam was so used to the right way being painful that he doubted any path that didn’t come with agony.”

Yes, an entire book tells one story, but sometimes simple lines can be overlooked. Take time to skim through the works you've read and keep an eye out for these quotes that hold significance different from what the entire piece might be saying.