Not Nothing Quotes

“Three things had never failed to shock the social worker: people's capacity for cruelty, their capacity for kindness, and their capacity for change.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“When we're babies we don't care what race or sexual orientation or gender identity someone is, and then we learn to care, but when we get old, we kind of turn back into babies again- I mean for real, with dolls and soft foods and diapers- and maybe all that dumb stuff we learned melts away.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“That’s the thing about hate. It can sometimes feel like a blanket against the cold, a salve against a wound. When you don’t have love, it can feel like a decent substitute.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“...but if a smile can make an ordinary person beautiful, a scowl can make a beautiful person ugly" -Josey”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Sometimes it’s easier to believe a pretty lie over a hideous truth.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Some things you only know in retrospect.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Life is not fair. The most you can hope for is that it's just.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made-up their minds to be or do either good or evil.”
― Gayle Forman , Not Nothing

“The world was full of people with missing mothers, broken families. But that didn't mean that the people were broken.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Maybe they wouldn't judge him by the worst things he'd done but by the better things he was trying to do.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Just because he hasn't spoken to us doesn't mean he doesn't speak.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Maybe he could. Maybe anyone could.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“When the people you loved left, that love remained, floating around, desperate for a place to go. And if it didn't find a place to go... bad things happened. Love turned into anger, fear, hate.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“It wasn't illegal but it had been right. It did not occur to him before that those two things might not always be the same.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Everyone who's promised me an opportunity has just made things worse. When I told the people in my old school about me and my mom, they all congratulated me on doing the right thing because now they had an opportunity to get us some help. I thought they meant food...but you know what they did? They made me go live with strangers and dragged my mom to a hospital and told her she'd have to get better if she wanted to be my mom. But if you know my mom like I do, you'd know she can't stand to be stuck in one place. That's why she moved so much. That's why during lockdown she got so much worse.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Being here for the summer is out of your control, but what you do while you're here is in your control.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Mirrors had been smashed. A smell of burnt hair hung in the air. People hadn't come just to loot. They'd come to desecrate.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Poland became a pie that had been divided up to be eaten by giants.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“It's interesting how sometimes you can't stand the people who go on to become so important in your life.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“Imagine the history he's lived through. The stories he has to tell.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“These were hands that privileges were dropped into, not hands that had to grasp for anything. Hands that would inherit a successful business, one that sold clothing, and yet did not even know how to sew.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“You sew with your hands, not your eyes.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“I sewed like other people knitted, to occupy my mind, to calm my nerves; I never felt safer than I did with a needle in my hand.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“He knew it wouldn't last. Nothing in his life had. But still, he liked it.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing

“It’s as if you’ve invited out my better self and, in doing so, invited me to rise to the occasion, rather than sink to it.”
― Gayle Forman, Not Nothing