Stephanie A. > Stephanie's Quotes

“Why not dream your own wonderful sequels? When you have finished a book, it can go on in your mind, the characters doing just what you want them to do.”
― Marguerite Henry, Dear Readers and Riders

“You accept that it’s time to cull your personal library. You lovingly handle each book, determining if it brings you joy. It does. They all do. You are full of bookish joy, but still woefully short on shelf space.”
― Anne Bogel, I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

“I find having your own car is like a passport to the world.”
― Gloria Whelan, See What I See

“The problem with collecting other people's junk is you just don't know what to do with it when you don't want it anymore. You feel bad about throwing it to the curb. It's too much trouble to sell. So you keep it around, knowing if you can't redeem it, exactly, you've at least rescued it. Somewhat.”
― Lisa Samson, A Thing of Beauty

“To learn that a great book has gone out of print is to be reminded of our mortality, because something we have made an intimate part of our emotional selves has been declared, by the publishing world and the culture at large, to be obsolete.”
― Marc Talbert

“To baby boomers wailing that the internet is turning innocent kids into vicious bullies - au contraire, we've been monsters all along.”
― Gabrielle Moss, Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of '80s and '90s Teen Fiction

“You're making yourself too important. Guilt comes from feeling we're at the center of the universe. We're not.”
― Gloria Whelan, See What I See

“Remember, childhood only lasts 10-12 years. There's a lot that has to be squeezed in to make for a lifetime of happy memories. ♥”
― Susan Branch

“Don't threaten me with your death, Mother. God doesn't want you, and the Devil won't have you. Doesn't want the competition.”
― Lynn Hall, The Giver

“I never want to produce anything that a family could not enjoy together. I never want to create art that would embarrass my own children later.”
― Clay Aiken, Learning to Sing: Hearing the Music in Your Life

“It doesn't have to be logical, it doesn't have to be love in the usual sense. It doesn't even have to be long lasting. Usually it isn't. But whatever it is, it is real and powerful while it lasts, and there's no point denying it.”
― Lynn Hall, The Giver

“It's a very brave thing for anyone to do, offering love to another person. We make ourselves so vulnerable when we do it, don't we? We give that other person such power to hurt us and to rob us of our dignity. No one should ever belittle that gift, nor the giver.”
― Lynn Hall, The Giver

“This is what it means to die: You do not finish.”
― Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine

“But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“Oh, sometimes I think it is of no use to make friends. They only go out of your life after awhile and leave a hurt that is worse than the emptiness before they came.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

“The optimism, the sense of possibility and hope comes at the end of August. There are new pens, unmarked novels, fresh textbooks, and promises of a better year. The season of reflection is not January but June.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“The quiet of a school emptied for the summer is that of a hotel closed for winter, a library closed for the night, ghosts swirling through the rooms.”
― Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing

“Sometimes the biggest heartbreak of all is letting go of the time before you knew things could ever be broken.”
― Meg Leder, The Museum of Heartbreak

“Money makes you weak because it tricks you into thinking you’re strong.”
― Julie Buxbaum, Admission

“All that heartbreak? It got us here.”
― Meg Leder, The Museum of Heartbreak

“How does dirt find its way into old houses like it does? Sometimes I think it's the house itself, old and disintegrating by degrees, breathing out sighs of itself, sighs longing for a little bit of notice.”
― Lisa Samson, A Thing of Beauty

“She was the girl in the fairy tale, sleeping in a prison of thorns and roses. "Wake up," My Secret Agent Lover Man said, kissing her. But she was suffocated by roses that no one else saw -- only their shadows showed on her lips and around her eyes.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie Bat

“Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.”
― Larry McMurtry, Books

“Life is so much better with books than without.”
― Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out

“I also think we underestimate just how weird—unexpected, unusual—a lot of famous books are. A long time spent in the public consciousness can sand down a book’s rough edges.”
― Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out

“a whole generation was more concerned with reassuring each other it was fine to stay in their mutual pits of gloom than with helping each other climb out of them.”
― Lauren Bravo, Preloved

“If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model and the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister, then New York is their cousin. Her hair is dyed autumn red or aubergine or Egyptian henna, depending on her mood. Her skin is pale as frost and she wears beautiful Jil Sander suits and Prada pumps on which she walks faster than a speeding taxi (when it is caught in rush hour, that is). Her lips are some unlikely shade of copper or violet, courtesy of her local MAC drag queen makeup consultant. She is always carrying bags of clothes, bouquets of roses, take-out Chinese containers, or bagels. Museum tags fill her pockets and purses, along with perfume samples and invitations to art gallery openings. When she is walking to work, to ward off bums or psychos, her face resembles the Statue of Liberty, but at home in her candlelit, dove-colored apartment, the stony look fades away and she smiles like the sterling roses she has brought for herself to make up for the fact that she is single and her feet are sore.”
― Francesca Lia Block, I Was a Teenage Fairy

“If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. The teenybopper sister snaps bug stretchy pink bubbles over her tongue and checks her lipgloss in the rearview mirror, . . . Teeny plays the radio too loud and bites her nails, wondering if the glitter polish will poison her.”
― Francesca Lia Block, I Was a Teenage Fairy