The Shape of Thunder Quotes

“My memories of my brother are like a garden full of weeds. I pull at them, somedays wanting to remove the bad ones, somedays wanting to remove the good ones because they hurt even more.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I'm so tired of people saying it's not my job to fix things. No one else is fixing them.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“It’s the worst thing when your memories turn into memories themselves. Becoming unreliable duplicates of the real thing.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“We hear the chirps of birds because where there are birds, there usually is water. And where there is water, there's life.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“There should be a word for when you miss a person in the future. Not just missing memories of them, but missing memories you never got to have with them.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“That's one of the things I hate the most about Mabel being gone. People want to remember her differently, perfectly. She was Mabel, my sister, my favorite person in the whole world, but she wasn't perfect. I want to remember her as she was..”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I just want to be okay. I don't want to feel okay. I want to be okay.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“My memory of my sister is a triangle, made up of bold lines but also sharp angles, and everyone else wants to remember her as a boring simple circle.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I wish I was little again. When the imaginary lava was on the carpet and not inside of me.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“The shape of thunder. What a strange phrase. It doesn’t quite make sense.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“The love is even bigger than the missing. I guess he's right, but sometimes the missing feels so big in my heart that I forget what the love even felt like.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Allowing yourself to be not okay sometimes is that big first step to actually being okay.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“It’s just hard to constantly feel like your identity is up for debate or that it’s okay for strangers to make random guesses about it.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Whenever I get a bad grade, I always try to explain to Mom that I did read the book. And just because I can't remember what color shirt the character was wearing in page six doesn't mean that I didn't read it. I mean, I was too busy crying about the dead dog at the end to remember what characters are wearing.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I lose track of my thoughts a lot. I have so many of them that by the time it comes to write them down, it ends up coming out all wrong, and my teachers start to think I don’t have any thoughts at all.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I think the answer lies in figuring out the shape of time. And the shape of time is probably like the shape of thunder. We think it’s impossible to map, but that’s because we haven’t pushed our brains to think in that way.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I want the Parker from earlier, the Parker he was before he changed- the Parker who held my hand in the ocean, the Parker who helped me get down from the tree, the Parker who taught me how to ride a bike. The Parker who used to sit with me on his bed, helping me sound out every word in my chapter book, patient when I got stuck on the s's and th’s.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“How do you draw guilt?"
"How do you draw forgiveness?”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“It’s also messed up that when white boys like Parker commit a violent crime, everyone tries to figure out why they did it. Me included. But when a Black or brown kid does something like that, no one asks more questions. It’s like they expected it of them or something.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Sometimes I worry that my grief is more anger than sadness- that the thing that I’m able to feel the most is this boiling-hot rage. It’s the part that always feels the realest.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Sometimes when I think about Parker, my memories feel like quicksand. It’s so easy to get stuck in them.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Mabel was so much more than these objects, but these objects also say Mabel.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Love, hope, and imagination can shape and change our world.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“It hurt, though, in a way I didn't expect, that reporters swarmed our town the day it happened, but then left the day after when it was clear the body count wasn't high enough to merit front-page coverage.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Once, though, he told me that in a way being an immigrant feels a lot like being an orphan, and with that logic, Grams is his American mother and he'll always feel grateful for that.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“It can be nice to commemorate the event, as there is power in remembrance, but it can also be very difficult to have to almost relive your trauma from the day.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“Sometimes at night I try on her shoes. Her strappy sandals and leather ballet flats. The shoes she never would've let me borrow if she were still alive.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“He never used to let me get sodas, but that's one of the few perks of having a dead sister- I'm now allowed to drink Coke.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I just like knowing things. The more you know, the less likely you are to be taken by surprise.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder

“I come to the woods because I’m looking for my brother. When I’m in the woods, I can pretend I’m in another world. I am looking for Parker from before, the person he was when we were younger, the person I want to save.”
― Jasmine Warga, The Shape of Thunder