Gary D. Schmidt

“Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?”

“I'm a librarian," he said. "I always know what I'm talking about.”

“When you find something that's whole, you do what you can to keep it that way. And when you fins something that isn't, then maybe it's not a bad idea to try to make it whole again. Maybe.”

“Maybe the Snowy Heron is going to come off pretty badly when the planes come together. Maybe. But he's still proud and beautiful. His head is high, and he's got this sharp beak that's facing out to the world.He's okay for now.”

“We were both chumps. But you know what? It's not so bad when you're chumps together.”

“Terrific.”

“How come when you're feeling good like this, something always happens to wreck it all? How come?”

“Okay, so maybe sometimes the real world is smiles and miracles.”

“One day we ran all the way to Jones Beach, and if Mrs. Sidman hadn't sent a bus after us, I think we would have collapsed on the boardwalk and died.”

“Toads, beetles, bats.”

“I wonder why Holling had the fastest time," said Danny after the announcements - a whole lot louder than he had to. "Could it be because he was running away from two rats who were trying to eat him?""That might have a little to do with it," I said.”

“When a girl holds a rose up to you, you run better, let me tell you.”

“Just swell.”

“In the whole story of the world, bananas have never once been a special treat.”

“Reader, I kissed her. A quiet walk we had, she and I.”

“In English, we were still on the Introduction to Poetry Unit, and I'm not lying, if I ever meet Percy Bysshe Shelley walking down the streets of Marysville, I'm going to punch him right in the face.”

“I'm not lying, I was a killer Helen Burns. I stepped out on to that stage like I was the Great Esquimaux Curlew. When Jane Eyre came to look at my book-- which happened to be Our Town -- I handed it to her just right. When Miss Scatchard told me I never cleaned my nails, I was about as quiet and innocent as a Large-Billed Puffin. When she hit me a dozen times with a bunch of twigs, I was the Brown Pelican: I didn't bat an eye -- and you try getting hit a dozen times with a bunch of twigs. And when I had to die, people were crying. Really. And you know why? Because I was the Black-Backed Gull, and so people cried like Helen Burns was their best friend.”

“No one ever comes back from Vietnam. Not really.”

“Do you ever wonder what it's like to be so angry that you...And then something happens, and after that, everyone figures that's what you're like, and that's what you're always going to be, and so you just decide to be it? But the whole time you're thinking, Am I going to be like him? Or am I already like him? And then you get angrier, because maybe you are, and you want...He stopped. He wiped at his eyes. I'm not lying. My brother wiped at his eyes.”

“Sometimes--and I know it doesn't last for anything more than a second--sometimes there can be perfect understanding between two people who can't stand each other. He smiled, and I smiled, and we put the Timex watches on, and we watched the seconds flit by.”

“By the way, in case you weren't paying attention or something, did you catch what Mr. Powell called me? "Young artist." I bet you missed that.”

“Maybe this happens to you every day, but I think it was the first time I could hardly wait to show something that I'd done to someone who would care besides my mother. You know how that feels?”

“Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?""Sometimes I do," she said, and then smiled. "but sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.”

“If Romeo had never met Juliet, maybe they both would have still been alive, but what they would have been alive for is the question Shakespeare wants us to answer.”

“Let the Art be brought back only for the good of the world. If it isn the hand of one who would use it for ill, in that world or this, then it will be upon you to destroy it—though its end means your own life-long exile." —Young Waeglim”

“There is no Art made without power, and there is no reason for Art to be made except for power.”

“If Mrs. Baker Hates your guts, why don't get some.”

“You know how that feels?”

“I'm not lying.”

“I never knew a building could hold so much inside.. . . I saw my town as if I had just arrived. It was as if I was waking up. You see houses and buildings every day, and you walk by them on your way to something else, and you hardly see. You hardly notice they're even there, mostly because there's something else going on right in front of your face. But when the town itself becomes the thing that is going on right in front of your face, it all changes, and you're not just looking at a house but at what's happened in that house before you were born.”

“No storm is forever.”

“A heart that has lost knows every other heart that has lost. Late and soon, loss is all the same.”

“I'm a librarian. I always know what I'm talking about”

“There are times when she makes me feel as stupid as asphalt.”

“more to be a human being with”

“We carry our childhood with us.”

“She came over and looked at the picture. Then she took my hand. You know what that feels like?Like what the astronauts will feel when they step onto the moon for the very first time.”

“There's no pleasure in getting to be an old coot unless you have some fun along the way.”

“You know, when someone has been crying, something gets left in the air. It's not something you can see or smell, or feel. Or draw. But it's there.”

“You know one thing that Mr. Powell taught me? He taught me that sometimes, art can make you forget everything else all around you. That's what are can do.”

“I almost cried. But I didn't, because if you're in seventh grade and you cry while wearing a blue floral cape and yellow tights with white feathers on the butt, you just have to curl up and die somewhere in a dark alley.”

“It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.”

“So you just went in and told him to give you two Cokes and he gave them to you?" "No, I didn't just go in and tell him to give me two Cokes. I asked for a Coke for me and a Coke for the skinny thug sitting on the library steps.”

“On Saturday mornings during deliveries, I'd practice picking out new words in Jane Eyre, sounding out the ones that needed sounding out—and I'm not lying, there were plenty. "'A new servitude! There is something in that,' I soliloquized." I mean, who talks like that? Do you know how long it takes to sound out a word like soliloquized? And even after you do, you have no idea what the stupid word means except that it probably just means "said," which is what stupid Charlotte Brontë should have said in the first place. When I delivered Mrs. Mason's groceries, she saw that I had Jane Eyre stuck under my arm. "Oh," she said, "that was my favorite novel in school." "It was?" I soliloquized.”

“You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say?Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?”

“Mrs. Daugherty was keeping my bowl of cream of wheat hot, and she had a special treat with it, she said. It was bananas.In the whole story of the world, bananas have never once been a special treat.”

“OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.”

“Maybe the first time that you know you really care about something is when you think about it not being there,and when you know-you really know-that the emptinessis as much as inside you as outside you.For it falls out,that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it;but being lacked and lost,why,then we rack the value,then we find the virtue that possesion would not show us while it was ours.That's when I knew for the first time that I really did love my sister.”

“Think of the sound you make when you let go after holding your breath for a very, very long time. Think of the gladdest sound you know: the sound of dawn on the first day of spring break, the sound of a bottle of Coke opening, the sound of a crowd cheering in your ears because you're coming down to the last part of a race--and you're ahead. Think of the sound of water over stones in a cold stream, and the sound of wind through green trees on a late May afternoon in Central Park. Think of the sound of a bus coming into the station carrying someone you love. Then put all those together.”

“I think something must happen to you when you get into eight grade. Like the Doug Swieteck's Brother Gene switches on and you become a jerk. Which may have been Hamlet, Prince of Denmark's problem, who, besides having a name that makes him sound like a breakfast special at Sunnyside Morning Restaurant--something between a ham slice and a three-egg omelet--didn't have the smarts to figure out that when someone takes the trouble to come back from beyond the grave to tell you that he's been murdered, it's probably behooveful to pay attention--which is the adjectival form.”