"Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don’t rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you’re doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry?

You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you , but now you’ll never know."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

""She was illusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.""
— Jerry Spinelli

"I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I’m a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time. -- Stargirl"
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me. "
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"Star people are rare."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Friendship isn't always sunnyside up."
— Jerry Spinelli

"The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to corkboard like a butterfly, but he pin merely went through and away she flew."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Heart and head are contrary historians."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Every name is real. That's the nature of names."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert."
— Jerry Spinelli

"Home is everything you can walk to."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing" I walked in a gray world of nothing."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"'She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.'
'Maybe that explains it,' I said.
"
— Jerry Spinelli

"“Nothing’s more fun than being carried away.”"
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

""if you learn to hate one or two persons... you'll soon hate millions of people.""
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"You occupied my space. But because you were not in my present, when I looked into my future I saw . . . nothing. Isn't that sad? And stupid?"
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert."
— Jerry Spinelli

"The kids who leave their favorite authors behind do not in fact leave us utterly abandoned, but in due time drive children of their own to the bookstore and the post office."
— Jerry Spinelli

"“It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a whole commotion going on inside us.” "
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.

"
— Jerry Spinelli

"Be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth."
— Jerry Spinelli

"The Clock on the Morning Lenape Building

Must Clocks be circles?
Time is not a circle.
Suppose the Mother of All Minutes started
right here, on the sidewalk
in front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the parade
of minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--
headed out that way, down Bridge Street.
Where would Now be? This minute?
Out past the moon?
Jupiter?
The nearest star?

Who came up with minutes, anyway?
Who needs them?
Name one good thing a minute's ever done.
They shorten fun and measure misery.
Get rid of them, I say.
Down with minutes!
And while you're at it--take hours
with you too. Don't get me started
on them.

Clocks--that's the problem.
Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.
Clocks strap us into their shape.
Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we do
is corkscrew.
Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel
riders of us all, lug us round and round
from number to number,
dice the time of our lives into tiny bits
until the bits are all we know
and the only question we care to ask is
"What time is it?"

As if minutes could tell.
As if Arnold could look up at this clock on
the Lenape Building and read:
15 Minutes till Found.
As if Charlie's time is not forever stuck
on Half Past Grace.
As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou
to step outside.
As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyers
need to know."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"Every child's bedroom is as important as a telescope orbiting the planet earth or a philosopher's study."
— Jerry Spinelli (Fourth Grade Rats)

"To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with -- what else -- mica."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Nobody knows who said it first, but somebody must have: 'Kid's gotta be a maniac."
— Jerry Spinelli (Maniac Magee)

"I think of the flower in the bud: huddled, compressed, dark. Yet somehow it feels the night, knows moon from sun. It waits...waits."
— Jerry Spinelli

"If you start by hating one or two people, you won't be able to stop. Pretty soon you'll hate a hundred people."
"A zillion?"
"Even a zillion. A little hatred goes a long, long way. It grows and grows. And it's hungry."
"Like Cimmamum?"
"Even hungrier. You keep feeding it more and more people, and the more it gets, the more it wants. It's never satisfied. And pretty soon it squeezes all the love out of your heart"--I pointed to her heart; she looked down at her chest--"and all you'll have left is a hateful heart."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"I am a mess. Like that MargieMocha, I am spilled across a floor, but there's nobody to mop me up. I have only one thing to show for the day: Perry Delloplane. The sound of a name. It is a grape in my mouth. I roll it over and over on my tongue--perrydelloplaneperrydelloplaneperrydelloplaneperrydelloplane--but when I try to crush it with my teeth, it slips away."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"Live today."
"Yes. Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you're doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry?"
"What am I doing?"
"You're cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you're stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today that you wasted is gone forever. It's now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you, but now you'll never know."
— Jerry Spinelli (Love, Stargirl)

"I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag -- it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

""Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his own best knuckle ball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down - not even the pitcher, much much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing.""
— Jerry Spinelli

"Sooner or later the let-loose sidewalk pups will cross the streets. Running, they will run into each other. And sooner or later, as surely as noses drip downward, it will no longer be enough to merely run. They must run against something. Against each other. It is in their instinct."
— Jerry Spinelli

"its a great book u gotta read it"
— Jerry Spinelli

"The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo."
— Jerry Spinelli (Stargirl)

"Live today like there's no tomorrow!"
— Jerry Spinelli

"Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart."
— Jerry Spinelli (Loser)

"Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you each lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of."
— Jerry Spinelli (Loser)

"The blanket was there, but it was the boy's embrace that covered and warmed him."
— Jerry Spinelli (Maniac Magee)

"Happy". I had not heard that word since Mr. Milgrom spoke it at the last Hanukkah. I asked him the question that had been on my mind since then. "Tata, what is happy?"
He looked at me and at the ceiling and back to me.
"Did you ever taste an orange?" he said. "
— Jerry Spinelli (Milkweed)

"As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.
"
— Jerry Spinelli