David Klass
David Klass is the author of many young adult novels, including You Don’t Know Me, Dark Angel, and Firestorm (The Caretaker Trilogy). He is also a Hollywood screenwriter, having written more than twenty-five action screenplays, including Kiss the Girls, starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, Walking Tall, starring The Rock, and Desperate Measures, starring Michael Keaton and Andy Garcia. Klass grew up in a family that loved literature and theater—his parents were both college professors and writers—but he was a reluctant reader, preferring sports to books. But he started loving the adventure stories his parents would bring home from the library—particularly Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexandre Dumas. After his sister twice won a story contest in Seventeen magazine, Klass decided he would win it too, and when he was a senior in high school, he did, publishing his first story, “Ringtoss,” in the magazine. He studied at Yale University, where he won the Veech Award for Best Imaginative Writing. He taught English in Japan, and wrote his first novel, The Atami Dragons, about that experience. He now lives in New York with his wife and two children.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/davidk...
“My mother is no longer shouting or shaking me, but she is still holding me very tightly. Even though I didn't speak out loud, she heard me and understood. "Don't you know?" she asks me back. "Don't you know who you are?" Tears are sliding down her cheeks and falling off onto my face. I never knew how hot someone else's tears feel. "You're part of me," she says, as if it is the deepest truth she knows. "You're all the family I have. The only person I can count on. You're flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, my only baby, and nothing else comes close to that. Nothing."And then she runs out of words, so she just clings to me, and not all the doctors in the world can pull her away.”
“I do not want to alarm her with the thought that we are being stalked by a convicted egg roll felon.”
“The piece you have written for us is called "The Gambol of the Caribou." Now, Mr. Steenwilly, I don't mean to be critical. What I know about music could be squeezed into a peanut shell, and there would still be room for the peanut. But I looked up "gambol" in the dictionary, and it means to "skip or jump about playfully." It also means to "caper or frolic." Caribou are large, ponderous, woolly reindeer.They do not gambol. They do not caper. They do not frolic. And they certainly do not skip. It would be an interesting sight to see a herd of caribou skipping down the tundra, but, Mr. Steenwilly, it would never happen. You could write a piece called "The Caribou Standing Still and Freezing Their Butts Off." Or "The March of the Caribou." Or even "The Stampede of the Caribou." But "The Gambol of the Caribou" is not such a great image to build a piece of music around.”
“Even if it’s dangerous, and painful, and so very, very lonely. One must go on fighting- It is the only honorable thing to do”
“You stand for nothing. You respect nobody. The music you dance to is devoid of beauty, its lyrics empty of humor or cleverness.”
“But something cannot be made out of nothing. Dust rose in the air, caught the rays of the sun for a brief moment and sparkled, and then returned to the earth as mere dust.”
“The good news is that you may have created my past and screwed up my present, but you have no control over my future. You don't know me at all.”
“Are you by any chance acquainted with the words 'steel toe'? Or do the words 'permanent dent' mean anything to you?"My locker door is not intimidated. "My grandfather was a vault at Fort Knox, and if you try to dent me with a kick you will only tear some ligament that will never mend.”
“You may have created my past and screwed up my present, but you have no control over my future.”
“You don't know me at all.You don't know the first thing about me. You don't know where I'm writing this from. You don't know what I look like. You have no power over me.What do you think I look like? Skinny? Freckles? Wire-rimmed glasses over brown eyes? No, I don't think so. Better look again. Deeper. It's like a kaleidoscope, isn't it? One minute I'm short, the next minute tall, one minute I'm geeky, one minute studly, my shape constantly changes, and the only thing that stays constant is my brown eyes. Watching you. ”
“I don't play the tuba. The tuba plays me. My tuba is not actually a tuba, because it has never produced a musical sound. It is actually a giant frog pretending to be a tuba.”