Jerry Spinelli > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“Do not follow me! 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 tommorrow. 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

“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

“Nothing’s more fun than being carried away.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“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

“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

“Heart and head are contrary historians.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“if you learn to hate one or two persons... you'll soon hate millions of people.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“Home is everything you can walk to.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“Friendship isn't always sunnyside up.”
― Jerry Spinelli

“We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance. ”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.”
― Jerry Spinelli, 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

“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

“When you own nothing, it's easy to let things go.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Milkweed

“Every name is real. That's the nature of names.”
― 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

“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! Love and Love and Love Again, Stargirl.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“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

“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

“Be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.”
― Jerry Spinelli

“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

“She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music.
She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.
In her answers in class, she often spoke of sea horses and stars, but she did not know what a football was...
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 a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.”
― Jerry Spinelli, 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

“Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat 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

“Because life doesn't always happen according to a timetable or calendar. And feelings can't be scheduled.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Today I Will: A Year of Quotes, Notes, and Promises to Myself

“You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people.”
― 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

“I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“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

“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

“I’m erased. I’m gone. I’m nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl…. And… I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“Tell me I didn't imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in seperate states, our star selves shared an enchanted place. Tell me that right around noon today (eastern time) you had the strangest sensation: a tiny chill on your shoulder...a flutter in the heart...a shadow of strawberry-banana crossing your tongue...tell me you whispered my name.”
― Jerry Spinelli

“One of the best things about life is friends. We all agree on that. And yet our shyness with strangers often prevents friendship from ever gaining a foothold. If only we would realize that the other person is probably just as shy as we are and is simply waiting—and hoping—for us to make the first move.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Today I Will: A Year of Quotes, Notes, and Promises to Myself

“No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about...One thing's for sure—no one but you can be the hero of your story.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Today I Will: A Year of Quotes, Notes, and Promises to Myself

“We long to be found, hoping our searchers have not given up and gone home.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“If I get a new idea today—or any day—I won't run from it. I won't trash it. If it's something I really want to do—I'll do it.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Today I Will: A Year of Quotes, Notes, and Promises to Myself

“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

“Whos love do you cherrish more? Hers or theirs? when you deside that, it's all downhill from there.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“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

“She dreams a lot. She dreams of Ondines and falling maidens and houses burning in the night. But search her dreams all you like and you'll never find Prince Charming. No knight on a white horse gallops into her dreams to carry her away. When she dreams of love, she dreams of smashed potatoes. ”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl

“It was different with you, Leo. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl