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 #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 #9
Features quotes from: Paper Towns by John Green; Waving Not Drowning by Stevie Smith; Fruits Basket Vol 21; Looking for Alaska by John Green; A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
(consider those your spoiler warnings)
——
And I felt the unbroken line of me and of her stretching back from our cribs to the dead guy to acquaintanceship to now. And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn’t planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together–but that seemed too cheesy to say, and anyway, she was standing up.
-John Green, Paper Towns
Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. this is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.
The smell leaves me seized by desperate panic–panic not like my lungs are out of air, but like the atmosphere itself is out of air. I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.
-John Green, Paper Towns
—–
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much farther out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And now waving, but drowning.
-Stevie Smith, Not Waving, but Drowning
—–
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
-Ray Bradbury
Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.
-Carol Burnett
Always be a first rate version of yourself, and not a second rate version of someone else.
-Judy Garland
“I wish I could have lived my life without making any wrong turns. But that’s impossible. A path like that doesn’t exist. We fail. We trip. We get lost. We make mistakes. And little by little, one step at a time, we push forward. It’s all we can do.”
-Kyo, Natsuki Takaya, Fruits Basket Vol 21
The other big difference, I would argue, is that lies are attempts to hide the truth by willfully denying facts. Fiction, on the other hand, is an attempt to reveal the truth by ignoring facts.
-John Green
“That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape–the world or the end of it?”
-Alaska, John Green, Looking for Alaska
“I must talk and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?”
-Dr. Hyde, John Green, Looking for Alaska
“Everything that comes together falls apart,” the Old Man said. “Everything. the chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you–they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”
-John Green, Looking for Alaska
She was whizzed into nothingness again, and nothingness was wonderful. She did not mind that she could not feel Calvin’s hand, that she could not see or feel or be. The relief from the intolerable pressure was all she needed.
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
They stood very still, side by side, in the shadow of one of the big office buildings. Six large doors kept swinging open, shut, open, shut, as people walked in and out, in and out, looking straight ahead, straight ahead, paying no attention to the children whatsoever, whatsoever.
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
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
