Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at emily.ecm@gmail.com.
Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at emily.ecm@gmail.com.
As book readers, we all read a lot of words in 2025. Some moments will remain in our minds forever. Some books will remain in our hearts and minds as just vibes, even if we forget the details of what actually happened on the page. But there are a few books—a few really standout books—from the year 2025 that have true staying power. Not just the story details, and not just the characters: there are specific words from these texts that will remain with us forever.
Here are some of the best quotes from readers’ favorite books of 2025. And fear not! If you haven’t gotten to some of these books yet, all of the quotes are spoiler-free.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
This nonfiction book examining the War on Terror, Black Lives Matter, and the slaughter in Gaza just won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
“The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: When it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments such as this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.”
“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.”
All Access members, read on for the most memorable lines from four more of the biggest books of 2025.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
This historical horror novel is topping a lot of year-end lists, including NYPL, Book Riot, Esquire, and Goodreads.
“You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.”
“The depravity of man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what binds us one to the other.”
Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
I had to include one of my personal favorite books of the year on this list. I mentioned it in the top horror books of 2025 and on Them‘s list of the best books of 2025. But I’m not the only one who loved this sapphic gothic horror novel! Hungerstone made NPR’s best books of the year.
“Appetite is a dirty word for women, a cardinal sin. For food and sex, yes, but also for power, for ambition, for violence… Is what we celebrate in men always monstrous in women? Is it also not monstrous to starve ourselves, to kill our appetite until we embody a living death?”
“All we can hope for in life is to know one’s own desires in order to be able to act on them. To want is to surrender to uncertainty. To step into the unknown. To expose ourselves to all possible outcomes and trust we will not be destroyed by disappointment.”
Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere was one of the most highly anticipated novels of the year for a lot of readers. Clearly, it did not disappoint, because here we are at the end of the year, and Atmosphere is making a lot of best-of lists.
“Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.”
“Well, we are the stars…And the stars are us. Every atom in our bodies was once out there. Was once a part of them. To look at the night sky is to look at parts of who you once were, who you may one day be.”
Audition by Katie Kitamura
Audition is another novel that has been on the top of people’s minds as it comes to year-end best-of lists. It was the first of 10 chosen by Publishers Weekly.
“People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.”
“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”
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Don’t forget to check out Book Riot’s full Best Books of the Year list!
English (US) · 