Mass Quotes #10
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
“We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”
-Charles Wallace, Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door
“When I was called to you,” Gaudior corrected. “And When is not what matters. It’s what happens in the When that matters.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
“Questions, questions.” Gaudior stomped one silver hoof. “I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
The author determines the text; the reader determines its meaning.
-John Green
“Let’s face it Aaron, we’re just too different: You like Stephen Hawking. I like Stephen King. You know it would never have worked.”
-Mel, Meg Cabot, The Boy Next Door
“You cannot imagine how time…can be…so still.
It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it.
It goes so slowly, and yet it is so scarce.”
-Margaret Edson, Wit
“Of course,” Brigitte said. “Adults have big, big wishes that we do not expect to come true. That is why we need so many more candles on our cakes.”
-Susan Patron, Lucky Breaks
Mass Quotes #8: Paper Towns & Let it Snow
This is the post I’ve been waiting to make for months featuring a lot of really cool quotes from John Green’s Paper Towns! Its official release date was today (though it hit shelves a week or two ago, because that’s how big chain stores are) and you should all read it. It is that amazing. I read it a few months ago as an ARC I borrowed from my librarian friend Heather and then today I went out & bought my own copy. This book has two covers & for now I have the happy Margo yellow cover, but in the future I hope to also get the sad Margo blue cover.
Look for a review of Paper Towns coming up on Typeset World next week because I will be reviewing this book for my school newspaper. Also keep an eye out for a post about how I met John Green, because I’m meeting him in a week!! 
(anyone else going to the Naperville event?)
Anyway, on with the quotes! SPOILERS AHEAD
Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much she became one.
Here’s what’s not beautiful about it: from here, you can’t see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is. It’s not even hard enough to be made of plastic. It’s a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I’ve lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters.
-Margo Roth Speigelman
“I mean, at some point you gotta stop looking up at the sky or one of these days you’ll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”
-Detective Otis Warren
“Yeah, so if that guy can make it in drunk, surely we can make it in sober. I mean, we’re ninjas.”
“Well, maybe you’re a ninja,” I said.
“You’re just a really loud, awkward ninja,” Margo said, “but we are both ninjas.”
“But it was the last string. It was a lame string, for sure, but it was the one I had left, and every paper girl needs at least one string, right?”
-Margo Roth Speigelman
It is so hard to leave–until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
————-
And now some extras, from Let it Snow:
I felt so alone on that train…a weird, unnatural kind of alone that bore into me. It was a feeling just beyond fear and somewhere to the left of sadness. Tired, but not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. It was dark and gloomy, and yet, it didn’t seem that things would get any better if the lights were turned up. If anything, I would be able to get a much better look at my unpleasant situation.
-Maureen Johnson, Let it Snow: The Jubilee Express
“I promise you that it will be okay,” the Duke said, her voice measured, quiet.
“You’re good at that,” I said. “At, like, saying crazy things in a way that makes me believe them.”
She stood up on her toes, grabbed me by the shoulders, and looked at me, her nose red and snow-wet, her face close to mine. “You do not like cheerleaders. You think they are lame. You like cute, funny, emo girls who I will enjoy hanging out with.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Yeah, that didn’t work,” I said.
“Damn it.” She smiled.
-John Green, Let it Snow: A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle
“Yeah, I’m already kind of cold,” she said, and then stood next to me, her side against mine. I couldn’t imagine how she could be cold beneath that gigantic ski coat, but it didn’t matter. It reminded me that at least I wasn’t alone out here. I reached up and mussed her hat as I put my arm around her.
“Duke, what are we gonna do?”
“This is probably more fun than Waffle House would be, anyway,” she said.
-John Green, Let it Snow: A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle
Mass Quotes #5
A lot of my current quotes in my notebook come from Paper Towns by John Green. But I read an ARC. The book does not come out until October and I don’t want to put any spoilers out there. So I’ll be nice and wait, impatiently. Fortunately for you though I have also been reading the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books and have plenty of quotes to share from those. But, as always, spoilers may be ahead, so continue with caution.
Bailey thought. “I’m afraid of time,” she answered. She was brave, unflinching in the big Cyclops eye of the camera. There was nothing prissy or self-conscious about Bailey. “I mean, I’m afraid of not having enough time,” she clarified, “Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I’m afraid of the quick judgments and mistakes that everybody makes. You can’t fix them without time. I’m afraid of seeing snapshots instead of movies.”
-Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if your friend was possibly dying.
Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.
-Ann Brashares, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
-E.L. Doctorow
“Like I said, I’m me…and you’re you. Who’s this or that doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about what Asuma said. Just be yourself.”
-Shikamaru, Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto 174
What made you feel that stomach-churning agony for one person and not another? If Bridget were God, she would have made it against the law for you to feel that way about someone without them having to feel it for you right back.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
She thought about Mr. Kaligaris and all his theories about protecting his mother. Yes, smelling Greek food made Valia sad. He was right about that. And being held by another human seemed to make her sad too. But sometimes, Carmen knew, being sad was what you had to do.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.
-Norman Mailer
The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.
Flexing her feet under the covers, Tibby thought of a corollary to this lesson: If you don’t try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Please let this be real, she thought wistfully. And if it’s not, let me just stay here anyway.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
She was still waiting for him to come back to her, even though he wasn’t going to. She was still holding out for something that wasn’t going to happen. She was good at waiting. That seemed like a sad thing to be good at.
Release me she begged, silently of her elephant.
She needed to be free of him. She needed to get on with her life. Maybe even fall in love again.
-Ann Brashares, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Love; Charles M Shultz
All you need is love. But a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt.
-Charles M Shultz
Education; Sandman
I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.
-Neil Gaiman, Sandman
Heartbreak; Madame la Fleurie
It was a page he had
Found in the handbook
Of heartbreak.
-Wallace Stevens, “Madame la Fleurie” Collected Poems
Love; The Witches
“My darling,” she said at last, “are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you.”
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
Destructive Love; The Bluest Eye
Along with romantic love, she was introduced to another–physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover, and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
-Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Love; Anonymous
Love is giving someone the chance to break your heart, but trusting them not to.
-Anonymous
Knowing; Grey’s Anatomy
“Is it better to know, than to wonder? Is it better to wake, than to sleep? Is it better to make the worst decision than none at all? We have to sweep today’s possibilities under tomorrow’s rug, until we can’t anymore. Until we finally understand what Benjamin Franklin meant…that knowing is better than wondering, that waking is better than sleeping, and that even the biggest failure, even the worst entrappable mistake, beats the hell out of never even trying.”
