Mass Quotes #15
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
- Oscar Wilde
“Most people don’t realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn’t value its librarians doesn’t value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?”
- Neil Gaiman
“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your book, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
- Stephen King
“Finish every day and be done with it… You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it…serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
- Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
All Nature is but art, unknown to thee
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial even, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
- Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
“When you’re in the present, you’re living your life. You’re not caught up in what could’ve been or what might be.”
- Better Off Ted
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
“I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, “Is he as crazy as I am?” I don’t need that question answered.”
- Philip Roth
“Let’s just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I’ll be me, today and today and today, and let’s trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies.”
- Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with the objective curiosity all the time.”
-Sylvia Plath
“Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.”
- Daniel DeFoe, Robinson Crusoe
“I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?”
- John Lennon
“I’m not always going to be like this,” Scarlett said. “I’ve been useful to you, right?”
“Many times,” Dakota said, leading her along. “Sometimes, we all get a little broken.”
A little broken. Scarlett wondered about that. At what point do you get so broken that it’s time to just get thrown away? She had a feeling she was about to find out.
- Maureen Johnson, Scarlett Fever
“There’s no race, no religion, no class system, no colour—nothing—no sexual orientation, that makes us better than anyone else. We’re all deserving of love.”
- Sandra Bullock, Oscars acceptance speech for Best Actress in The Blind Side
“An ‘anyway’ friend is the one person in your life, who no matter what they say or do, no matter what they’ve been through with you, they love you anyway.”
- Private Practice
“Speaking as a writer, I’m not interested in trends, I want to write books that are honest, with characters as true to the inner world of the story as I can make them.”
- Susan Patron in an interview with American Libraries about The Higher Power of Lucky
This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t,
You try until you can’t,
You laugh until you cry,
You cry until you laugh,
And everyone must breath,
Until their dying breath.
- Regina Spektor, On the Radio
Mass Quotes #14
“A writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories”
- John Irving
“Writing is one of the few careers for which you essentially train yourself, the other two majors ones being juggling and pickpocketing.”
- Maureen Johnson
“”Sometimes I feel like I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me when I can be normal again,” she said, “I keep thinking I’ll get a letter. Or a call. When does it happen?”
Pete looked like he wanted to walk toward her, but then he fell back against the car. The staring contest between them for almost a minute, and finally Pete exhaled loudly.
“It’s okay,” he said.”
- Maureen Johnson, The Key to the Golden Firebird
“Maybe you’ve never fallen into a frozen stream. Here’s what happens.
1. It is cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in you brain gets the readings and says, “I can’t deal with this. I’m out of here.” It puts up the OUT TO LUNCH sign and passes all responsibility to the…
2. Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof, which gets all this gobbledygook from the temperature department that it can’t understand. “This is so not our job,” it says. So it just starts hitting random buttons, filling you with strange and unpleasant sensations, and calls the…
3. Office of Confusion and Panic, where there is always someone ready to hop on the phone the moment it rings. This office is at least willing to take some action. The Office of Confusion and Panic loves hitting buttons.”
- Maureen Johnson
Richard had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.
- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
“So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding. “
- Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
“Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for plannning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future–you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.”
- John Green, Paper Towns
“All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?”
- Ernest Hemingway
“There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.”
- Ernest Hemingway
Mass Quotes #13
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.
- Neil Gaiman
“Saying ‘I notice you’re a nerd’ is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?’ In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even ‘lame’ is kind of lame. Saying ‘You’re lame’ is like saying ‘You walk with a limp.’ Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he’s done all right for himself.”
- John Green
I try to live life so that I can live with myself.
- John Green
Here’s to all the places we went. And all the places we’ll go. And here’s to me, whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou.
- John Green, Looking for Alaska
“Influenced by my hopeless romantic and super sensitive mindset, I pay far too much attention to the little things in life and in the relationship between two people. In constant need of reassurance, explanation, closure, and attention, my paintings are made.”
- Kurt Halsey
By the time Lionel was six, he knew what he wanted to be.
John Wayne.
Not the actor, but the character. Not the man, but the hero. The John Wayne who cleaned up cattle towns and made them safe for decent folk. The John Wayne who shot guns out of the hands of outlaws. The John Wayne who saved stagecoaches and wagon trains from Indian attacks.
When Lionel told his father he wanted to be John Wayne, his father said it might be a good idea, but that he should keep his options open.
- Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water
In the end all that’s left is the beating of my heart, the in and out of my breath. Of Sarah’s. Tayshawn’s. The rest of us who are left behind.
We still tick. We still tock.
It hurts.
- Justine Larbalestier, LIAR
Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
– Orson Scott Card
But who needs love when there’s Law and Order?
And who needs love when there’s Southern Comfort?
And who needs love when the sandwiches are wicked
and they know you at the Mac store?
- Amanda Palmer, Leeds United
Give in to love or live in fear. No other path, no other way. No day but today.
- Jonathan Larson, Rent
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
- Carl Jung
Life can sometimes suck. Like, a lot. People will break your trust. Secrets will fly and everyone will turn on each other. But you’ll keep going. Life doesn’t stop because it’s especially sucky. Such is the way of the world. Also: There are some friends who are abso-bloody-lutely wonderful. Keep a hold of them.
- Casye Davidson
“When you’re a kid you assume your parents are soulmates. My kids are going to be right about that.”
- Pam Beesly, The Office
But don’t forget who you really are. And I’m not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you. You know who you really are. when you’re alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you… Your muscles with toughen. So will your heart and soul. That’s necessary for survival. But don’t lose touch with that person deep inside you, or else you won’t really have survived at all.
- Louis Sachar
“I’ve kissed a guy… I’ve kissed guys. I just haven’t felt that thing… that thing… That moment when you kiss someone and everything around you becomes hazy, and the only thing in focus is you and this person. And you realize that that person is the only person you’re supposed to kiss for the rest of your life. And for one moment you get this amazing gift. and you wanna laugh and you wanna cry, cause you feel so lucky that you’ve found it, and so scared that it’ll go away all at the same time.”
- Drew Berrymore, “Never Been Kissed”
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go.
- Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
“I’ve lost everything: my job, my future, everything people think is important, but I don’t care – because even if I have to dig ditches for the rest of my life, I shall be a ditch-digger who once had a wonderful day.”
- Cornelius Hackl, Hello Dolly
“Smile, it enhances your face value”
- Dolly Parton in Steel Magnolias
Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts? Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts. So it’s fairly simple to cut right through the mess and to stop the muscle that makes us confess. We are so fragile, and our cracking bones make noise. And we are just breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys.
- Ingrid Michaelson, Breakable
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?
- Ernest Hemingway
The world is ours, ours for the taking.
Yes there’s scars, but nothing that a little love won’t heal.
- Seabird, Trust
I know you’ve been afraid,
that’s why you stay awake all night and sleep through the day.
Hoping to find a hand you can hold, before you grow up and grow old.
- Seabird, This Ain’t Home
Mass Quotes #12
“It’s hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he’s okay. It’s hard to be the one who stays.
I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.
I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I’m tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that’s been under the snow all winter. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?
Long ago, men went to sea, and women waited for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?”
- Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were coming or I’d have cleaned up a little more. My life, I mean, not just the apartment.”
- Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
“‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ One of Herman Melville’s short stories.”
“I guess. The point is that this guy had lost touch with reality. And you know what happens to him at the end of the story?”
“It’s fiction, Cliff.”
“He dies. That’s what happens. Suggest anything to you?”
“We all die, Cliff.”
- Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water
“Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.”
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
“We’re meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are?”
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
“I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long. If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can play together all night.”
- Bill Watterson
“A house without books is like a room without windows.”
- Horace Mann
“Stories never really end…even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on. They don’t end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page.”
- Cornelia Funke
“Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells… and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower…both strange and familiar.”
- Cornelia Funke, Inkspell
“I wouldn’t trade your love for all the candy in this great, big world. Me, I feel so crazy blessed and so lucky, to be the place you go, when you need to feel safe, when you need a kiss. Don’t be afraid, because what you’ll have is me.”
- Plumb, Me
“And we know it’s never simple, never easy
Never a clean break
No one here to save me
You’re the only one I know like the back of my hand”
- Taylor Swift, Breathe
“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.”
- Lemony Snicket
“If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.”
- Lemony Snicket
“Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder”
- Henry David Thoreau
“The more research I’ve done on this, the more it seems to be that it’s not the words so much as the force behind them. I think people get too caught up in whether a word is or isn’t offensive and lose sight of what’s actually being said.”
- Justine Larbalestier, LIAR
“Zach was my boyfriend. He told me everything,” she says, but her voice falters. No one tells anyone everything.”
- Justine Larbalestier, LIAR
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
- John Green, Looking for Alaska
“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
- Nick Hornby
“The characters arrive when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book. They “run away,” they “get out of hand”: they are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.”
- E. M. Forester, Aspects of the Novel
“I’d rather have had your freedom than my land.”
Carl shook his head mournfully. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
- Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
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 #7
You play grown-up long enough and you lose your perspective on right and wrong. Why not put it off as long as possible?
-Nico, Zeb Wells, Civil War: Young Avengers/Runaways #4
Gert: I’m not buried in that plot, Karolina. Some woman claiming to be me from the future is.
Molly: Why do they call it a plot anyway?
Gert: Because this is how every story ends
-Brian K Vaughan, Runaways #19
He’s a thief. He knows the best security systems are the ones nearest to the bounty. But the human heart can’t accommodate logic. Though I should have realized–that it can overcompensate for it.
-X-Cutioner, Fabian Nicleza, Gambit #5
I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflux. I wasn’t trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn’t Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn’t shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.
-Bella, Stephenie Meyer, Breaking Dawn
“You’ll still be Arthur Penhaligon,” she said. “Not the brightest, not the bravest, but up for anything. Least, that’s how I see you. Kind of like a little brother, only you’re taller than me now.”
-Suzy Turquoise Blue, Garth Nix, Superior Saturday
Arthur held the floats for a minute, thinking about something his mother had once said when she was explaining something to his sister Michaeli and didn’t know he was listening. There is never one absolutely right thing to do. All you can do is honor what you believe, accept the consequences of your own actions, and make the best out of whatever happens.
-Garth Nix, Superior Saturday
They move fast. They don’t pull their punches. Real nightmares never do.
-Ed Brubaker, Uncanny X-Men #501
Hisako: That doesn’t sound like such a good idea Mr. Summers.
Cyclops: We’re on mission time now. Codenames.
Hisako: Sorry. That sounds like we’re all going to die, Cyclops
-Warren Ellis, Astonishing X-Men #25
When we die, we come back different, like, with greener eyes, or as some far off star
-A Softer World
Mass Quotes #6
I still can’t post from Paper Towns. Sigh.
The next post will most likely be all quotes from Breaking Dawn, which I picked up at midnight last night, but am nowhere near finishing (I worked all day!). I will post a spoiler warning though. Here’s what I haven’t posted yet.
After that she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it.
-Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue, The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
“We are trapped in our senses,” her old teacher, Annik, told her once. “They are all we have of the world.”
And so they are the world, Lena remembered thinking then, and many times since.
-Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue, The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
Right now I’m having amnesia and déja vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.
-Steven Wright
“I know what it is,” she said. “We aren’t in Bethesda anymore and we aren’t in high school. We aren’t really in our families and we aren’t in our houses. Those are the places we grew up and the times we spent together, but they aren’t us. If we think they are, then we’re lost, because times end and places are lost. We aren’t any place or any time.”
She thought of their Pants. She pictured them blowing off the laundry line and into the air, floating and soaring until they silently merged into sky and sea.
“That’s the thing. We are everywhere.”
-Carmen, Ann Brashares, Forever in Blue, the Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
“Faith is personal, you have to figure it out for yourself.”
-Mr. Raeburn, State of Grace
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
Mass Quotes #4
Today’s my last day of summer school, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this more often again. The good thing about summer school though is that I read a ton of amazing books for my children’s literature class, so I’ve got lots of new quotes for you. I’m waiting to take my children’s lit exam right now actually, so I don’t know how many I can post at the moment, but let’s find out.
“And even if you carry a survival kit around with you at all times, it won’t guarantee you’ll survive. No kit in the world can protect you from all the possible bad things.”
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
“The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.”
-Goose, E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“I don’t think it’s normal. You know perfectly well animals don’t talk.”
Mr. Arable grinned. “Maybe our ears aren’t as sharp as Fern’s,” he said.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.
-Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Something was happening — no one was sure what. But out there back of beyond, far past the coastal ranges and the leagues of forest, the land changed and began opening to the sky.
-John Madson, Where the Sky Began
“Stand up and walk. Keep going forward. At least you have strong legs to take you there.”
-Ed, Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 1
“But you will be faced now,” she explained gently, “with a pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The Receiver himself was not able to describe it, only to remind us that you would be faced with it, that you would need immense courage. We cannot prepare you for that.
“But we feel certain that you are brave,” she said to him.
-Lois Lowry, The Giver
Rules and Things Number 83: If an adult tells you not to worry, and you weren’t worried before, you better hurry up and start ’cause you’re already running late.
-Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
“But Grandmamma,” I said, “if nobody has ever seen The Grand High Witch, how can you be so sure she exists?”
My grandmother gave me a long and very severe look. “Nobody has ever seen the Devil,” she said,” but we know he exists.”
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
I found myself thinking, What’s so wonderful about being a little boy anyway? Why is that necessarily any better than being a mouse? I know that mice get hunted and they sometimes get poisoned or caught in traps. But little boys sometimes get killed, too. Little boys can be run over by motor-cars or they can die of some awful illness. Little boys have to go to school. Mice don’t. Mice don’t have to pass exams. Mice don’t have to worry about money. Mice, as far as I can see, have only two enemies, humans and cats. My grandmother is a human, but I know for certain she will always love me whoever I am. And she never, thank goodness, keeps a cat. When mice grow up, they don’t ever have to go to war and fight against other mice. Mice, I felt pretty certain, all like each other. People don’t.
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
If you’re looking for good reads this summer I highly recommend all of these (except for Where the Sky Began, that’s a boring book about the prairie I had to read for Eco). I’m having trouble deciding if my new favorite children’s book is The Witches, if it’s The Higher Power of Lucky, or if it will continue to be Through the Looking Glass. Probably Looking Glass, but the other two are definitely vying for second place.
