Gemma > Gemma's Quotes

“The fundamental mistake I had always made - and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make - was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“People like to have something to turn down, though. They want to be able to say no to some things, because it makes their yes more meaningful.”
― Deb Caletti, The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

“The word just hangs, until Severin starts the blender and there's only the sound of crunching and grinding vitamins, the silvery core of nourishment, containing every essential thing but the nourishment itself.”
― Deb Caletti, The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

“It's some twisted, limited, grocery-store mentality, where people have to be dairy products or vegetables or frozen foods for us to be able to understand them and feel safe. Maybe we've just become such mega-consumers that we can't deal with anything that's slightly inconvenient (basically, anything that requires thought). I was the tofu amidst the Baking Products and Cleaning Supplies.”
― Deb Caletti, The Fortunes of Indigo Skye

“When she and Wren divided up their clothes, Wren had taken anything that said "party at a boy's place" or "leaving the house." Cath had taken everything that said "up all night writing" or "it's okay to spill tea on this.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“It's like I'm trying to distract him with something shiny." Cath circled her spoon hand in front of her face, accidentally flicking cottage cheese on her sweater. "He already knows about all this. This is what I look like." She tried to scrape the cottage cheese off without rubbing it in.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Since the teachers weren't picking, I ended up with a boy with bad body odour. 'You should wear deodorant,' I said to him. 'And you should shut your trap,' he replied.”
― Lorna Schultz Nicholson, Fragile Bones: Harrison & Anna

“EAN codes ordinarily have the first three digits (the prefix) identifying the country of manufacture, but that doesn't make sense for books. The industry committee's clever solution was to invent two new imaginary countries -- called Bookland 1 and Bookland 2 -- with corresponding prefixes of 978 and 979." (29)”
― Bruce T. Batchelor, Book Marketing DeMystified: Enjoy Discovering the Optimal Way to Sell Your Self-Published Book, Practical advice from the inventor of print-on-demand (POD) publishing

“When Tyler emerged from Pod 3, he looked like he always does--distracted and handsome with a double helping of hot-artist sauce (73).”
― Susan Juby, The Truth Commission

“When we reached the lobby outside the office, moving like a pair of power walkers--no running in the halls of Green Pastures because there was too much chance of knocking over one of the many ethereal, artistic types wandering around in hip glasses with the wrong prescription... (39)”
― Susan Juby, The Truth Commission

“To the world’s most perfect woman.’ It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect

“I thought you were happy about having a baby.’ I was happy in the way that I would be happy if the captain of an aircraft in which I was travelling announced that he had succeeded in restarting one engine after both had failed. Pleased that I would now probably survive, but shocked that the situation had arisen in the first place, and expecting a thorough investigation into the circumstances.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect

“Greetings. My name is Don Tillman and I am a suspected paedophile. I wish to put myself on standby for an assessment.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect

“I was suddenly angry. I wanted to shake not just Lydia but the whole world of people who do not understand the difference between control of emotion and lack of it, and who make a totally illogical connection between inability to read others’ emotions and inability to experience their own.”
― Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Effect

“But it appeared that the motivation for the project was a newspaper article titled 'Research Proves Kids Need a Mom and a Dad.' Someone had written the word 'crap' in red beside the article. It was an excellent start. Scientists need to cultivate a suspicious attitude to research.”
― Graeme Simsion

“Culver is a language magnet school. What it's mainly a magnet for, if you want to know the truth, is nerds.”
― Dave Barry

“I really, really like Suzana Delgado, who is the most beautiful girl in the eighth grade and probably the world. She has like 183 million Instagram followers.”
― Dave Barry, The Worst Class Trip Ever

“So for some reason everybody makes this huge deal about pandas. I don't know why. They never actually do anything except eat and poop. But they're really famous.' 'Yeah," said Suzana. 'They're like the Kardashians of zoo animals.”
― Dave Barry, The Worst Class Trip Ever

“She fixed things that were broken, and then began fixing things that weren't broken, or broke things so they could be fixed in ways no one understood or found particularly convenient.”
― Jordan Stratford, Wollstonecraft

“She decided at once that she and the boy were cut of the same bookish cloth, and could quite possibly become co-conspirators.”
― Jordan Stratford, Wollstonecraft

“Riding in a carriage without an escort is modern. But traveling out and about unescorted is unheard of.”
― Jordan Stratford, The Case of the Missing Moonstone

“The oddly shaped man had introduced himself as a Mr. Abernathy, a wealthy friend of the family. "I'm a wealthy friend of the family," he had said. "Very rich. Friendly.”
― Jordan Stratford, The Case of the Missing Moonstone

“No! I had too many variables! Two of those variables were actually the same variable, so I revised the equation and then it all made perfect sense!" Ada was truly excited. "You seem truly excited, Lady Ada," said Anna cautiously.”
― Jordan Stratford, The Case of the Missing Moonstone

“But Princess Magnolia wore glass slippers on weekdays. Princess Magnolia was afraid of snails. Sunlight made Princess Magnolia sneeze. And at the moment, the Princess in Black was hog-tying a monster.”
― Shannon Hale, The Princess in Black

“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

That’s what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”
― Robert R. McCammon, Boy's Life

“After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation.”
― Robert R. McCammon, Boy's Life