Powerful Quotes from Fresh Ink

Fresh Ink is not hot-off-the-press, still-drying-in-your-hands ink. Instead, it’s twelve stories with endings that are still being written—whose next chapters are up to you.  Because these stories are meant to be read. And shared.

Thirteen of the most accomplished YA authors deliver a label-defying anthology that includes ten short stories, a graphic novel, and a one-act play from Walter Dean Myers never before in-print. This collection addresses topics like gentrification, acceptance, untimely death, coming out, and poverty and ranges in genre from contemporary realistic fiction to adventure and romance. It will inspire you to break conventions, bend the rules, and color outside the lines. All you need is fresh ink.

Here are just a few of our favorite powerful quotes from one of our favorite powerful anthologies.

It occurred to me, as if a letter slowly slipped through the sky, down past stars, through the dark, and fell into my hands, the words glistening there like their own kind of graffiti scrawled across my heart: We’re one voice when we want to be.

Melissa de la Cruz

Yes, we are flawed, she had planned on saying. But we have an endless capacity for joy and hope. We are capable of loving unconditionally.

Nicola Yoon

I was beginning to understand how easy it was to be silent, to think of yourself as a vanished Indian. Everywhere you looked, you weren’t there. I wondered to myself if the Resusci-Annie only came with blond hair and skin in one shade, the one the art pencil company simply called Flesh.

Eric Gansworth

Being alive is walking the damned streets, and making love, and listening to some music.

Walter Dean Meyers

I want to do something creative, you know? Like work in Hollywood or something, behind the scenes. Produce stuff. I want to help make sure that someday movies do include people like gender-flipped Sulu and race-bent Scully.

Malinda Lo

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