Laurie Halse Anderson

“Emma hears me come up the stairs and asks me to watch a movie with her. I stick Band-Aids on my weeping cuts, put on pink pajamas so we match, and snuggle with her under her rainbow comforter. She arranges all of her stuffed animals around us in a circle, everyone facing the TV, then presses play...Ghosts dare not enter here.”

“There is no safer. There’s not even safe, never has been.”

“I watch some kids ask the cafeteria ladies to sign their books. What do they write: "Hope your chicken patties never bleed?" Or, maybe, "May your Jell-O always wiggle?”

“They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American.”

“Maybe they're planning the next Project. They could mail snowballs to the weather-deprived children in Texas. They could knit goat-hair blankets for shorn sheep.”

“He says a million things without saying a word. I have never heard a more eloquentsilence.”

“I am thawing.”

“I am so sorry. I wish you knew even one tenth of one percent of how sorry I am. ...It was my fault. Can I kill myself here, or should I do it outside, so the mess on your carpet doesn't upset your mother?”

“Too much sun after a Syracuse winter does strange things to your head, makes you feel strong, even if you aren't.”

“They tied me back together, but they didn't use double knots. My insides are draining out of the fault lines in my skin, I can feel it, but every time I check the bandages, they're dry.”

“If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.”

“There's no point in asking why, even though everybody will. I know why. The harder question is "why not?" I can't believe she ran out of answers before I did.”

“I understood what triggered her earthquakes, most of them.”

“The dead do walk and haunt and crawl into your bed at night. Ghosts sneak into your head when you're not looking. Stars line up and volcanoes birth out bits of glass that foretell the future. Poison berries make girls stronger, but sometimes kill them. If you howl at the moon and swear on your blood, anything you desire will be yours. Be careful what you wish for. There's always a catch.”

“Death is funny, when you think about it. Everybody does it, but nobody knows how, exactly how.”

“The number doesn't matter. If I got down to 070.00, I'd want to be 065.00. If I weight 010.00, I wouldn't be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.”

“I am Outcast.""The kids behind me laugh so loud I know they’re laughing about me. I can’t help myself. I turn around. It’s Rachel, surrounded by a bunch of kids wearing clothes that most definitely did not come from the EastSide Mall. Rachel Bruin, my ex-best friend. She stares at something above my left ear. Words climb up my throat. This was the girl who suffered through Brownies with me, who taught me how to swim, who understood about my parents, who didn’t make fun of my bedroom. If there is anyone in the entire galaxy I am dying to tell what really happened, it’s Rachel. My throat burns.""Her eyes meet mine for a second. “I hate you,” she mouths silently.”

“I see a girl caught in the remains of a holiday gone bad, with her flesh picked off day after day as the carcass dries out. The knife and fork are abviously middle-class sensibilities. The palm tree is a nice touch. A broken dream,perhaps? Plastic honeymoon, deserted island? Oh, If you put in a slice of pumpkin pie, it could be a desserted island! (Pg 64)”

“I am not going to think about it. It was ugly, but it’s over, and I’m not going to think about it.”

“Why not draw naked guys, just to be fair? Naked women is art, naked guys a no-no, I bet. Probably because most painters are men.”

“The same boys who got detention in elementary school for beating the crap out of people are now rewarded for it. They call it football.”

“I’m the girl who trips on the dance floor and can’t find her way to the exit. All eyes on me.”

“I am a gluttonous, gorging failure. A waste. My body isn’t used to high-sugar carbs laced with witchcraft. It can barely cope with soup and crackers.”

“They yell at me because I can’t see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.”

“A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.”

“Ninth grade is a minor inconvenience to him. A zit-cream commercial before the Feature Film of Life.”

“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.”

“They mean hot like 'I'm too good for you I got my own money don't be frontin' me.' You're more like 'Be my boyfriend I'll make you cookies come meet my dad ' know what I mean”

“The stars whirled above us and the firecrackers blazed. The moon stood watch as drops of blood fell, careless seeds that sizzled in the snow.”

“i decapitated dandelions all morning, leaving carnage and death strewn into my path.”

“Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind.”

“Too much sleep is bad for your health, Matilda." She slipped a freshly made ball of butter into a stone crock. "It must be such a grippe, a sleeping sickness.”

“I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.”

“I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.”

“Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls”

“It doesn't hurt. Nothing hurts except the small smiles and blushes that flash across the room like tiny sparrows.”

“I look at my homely sketch. It doesn't need anything. Even through the river in my eyes I can see that. It isn't perfect and that makes it just right.”

“Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.”

“I have ten bucks in my pocket - what to spend it on? French fries - ten dollars' worth of french fries, ultimate fantasy.”

“Make it bend — trees are flexible, so they don’t snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch — perfect trees don’t exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I’ll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I’ll think about a career path.”

“This camp is a forge for the army; it's testing our mettle. Instead of heat and hammer, our trials are cold and hunger. Question is, what are we made of?”

“We'd itch the vermin feasting on our flesh and share the day's many rumors:The King had declared peace.No, the King was sending German and Russian mercenaries to destroy us.A ball of fire as big as a man's head fell from heaven to Hatboro - a good omen. But there'd been an earthquake near York just as a cat gave birth to puppies, which meant the worst.”

“Rumors are spread by jealous people”

“I cry to let everything out”

“She cannot chain my soul. Yes, she could hurt me. She'd already done so...I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live, or not. But she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her.”

“I am spinning the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. The tiny elf dancer became a wooden doll whose strings were jerked by people not paying attention. I spun out of control. Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.I wanted to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness. Cassie did, too. We leaned on each other, lost in the dark and wandering in endless circles. She got too tired an went to sleep. Somehow, I dragged myself out of the dark and asked for help.I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape.There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.I am thawing.”

“Sometimes being an adult means doing the right thing, even if it's not what you want.”

“She offered herself to the big, bad wolf and didn't scream when he took the first bite.”

“I can see us, living in the woods, her wearing that A, me with a S maybe, S for silent, S for stupid, for scared. S for silly. For shame.”