Jamie > Jamie's Quotes

“But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“But you have to be careful which metaphor you use, because it matters... The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“I do my precalc homework, and then when I'm done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That's the kind of weekend it is--the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“i know he's been looking forward to this--and i know that i've been looking forward to this. but now i have to stop looking forward and start looking at where i am. it's hard.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“I really hate it when a teacher has to show that she isn't behind the times by using some expression which sounds so up-to-date you know for sure she's behind the times.”
― Paul Zindel, The Pigman

“Be yourself! Be individualistic!' he called out after me. 'But for God's sake get your hair cut. You look like an oddball.”
― Paul Zindel, The Pigman

“It's strange, but when it comes right down to it I never do fall apart--even when I'm sure I will.”
― Judy Blume, Forever...

“It's true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn't mean we are all jumping in bed together.”
― Judy Blume, Forever...

“I wonder, I thought, what I am really thinking. Last week I would have known definitely but now everything seemed vague and evasive.”
― Maureen Daly, Seventeenth Summer

“A sudden thought struck me. Wouldn't it be odd if my mother got old! ... It is only natural that when your children are big you must be older but somehow I had never thought of its happening to my mother... What a peculiar thing to think of in the bright sunshine of the afternoon!”
― Maureen Daly, Seventeenth Summer

“A girl can't feel like a lady with a bottle of beer before her.”
― Maureen Daly, Seventeenth Summer

“There was nothing more beautiful in the world than the sight of a teacher getting upset.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Do I dare disturb the universe?

Yes, I do, I do. I think.

Jerry suddenly understood the poster--the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?”
― Robert Cormier, The Chocolate War

“It's the climbing that makes the man. Getting to the top is an extra reward. ”
― Robert Lipsyte, The Contender

“It seemed to him that anyone with any trouble at all eventually found his way to a city library, and the really troubled ones became regulars.”
― M.E. Kerr, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

“Tucker, to make anything work, from meat loaf to a marriage, there are two things you have to do. Forgive and continue.”
― M.E. Kerr, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

“When I get nervous, I go to the library and hang around. The libraries are filled with people who are nervous. You can blend in with them there. You're bound to see someone more nervous than you are in a library. Sometimes the librarians themselves are more nervous than you are. I'll probably be a librarian for that reason. Then if I'm nervous on the job, it won't show. I'll just stamp books and look things up for people and run back and forth to the staff room sneaking smokes until I get hold of myself. A library is a great place to hid.”
― M.E. Kerr, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

“One day I almost said it . . . after goin over the words in my mind, "Benjie, the greatest thing in the world is to love someone and they love you too." But when I opened my mouth, I said, "Benjie, brush the crumbs off your jacket.”
― Alice Childress, A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich

“Schoolteachers can be some hard-eyed people, with talkin eyes; they mouth sayin one thing and them eyes be screamin another.”
― Alice Childress, A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich

“I only knew that there was a certain rightness in life--the feeling you got when you did something the way you knew you should.”
― Laurence Yep, Dragonwings

“And all of a sudden I saw that if life seems awfully petty most of the time, every now and then there is something noble and beautiful and almost pure that lifts us suddenly out of the pettiness and lets us share in it a little.”
― Laurence Yep, Dragonwings

“The thing that truly amazes me about myself is that I’m actually more scared of being embarrassed than anything else.”
― Melvin Burgess, Doing It