Maureen Johnson

“because talent alone doesn't make an artist”

“She had always thought applying to college would be exciting. Living away from home, meeting so many new people, Learning new things, making a few poor life desicisons....”

“i get a little romantic about the old Empire State. Just looking at it makes me want to play some Frank Sinatra tunes and sway a little. I have a crush on a building. I'd been in there several times but never to work. I always knew there were offices in there but the face never penetrated, really. You don't work in the Empire State Building. You propose in the Empire State Building. You sneak a flask up there and raise a toast to the whole city of New York.”

“Money is for doing things, my love. Don't sit on it like a hen sits on an egg. It doesn't hatch. I should know. I've made enough of it.”

“It was as if the news itself wanted to reassure me. Even Jack the Ripper himself had reappeared as part of the greeting committee.”

“Tired, but not the kind of tired that sleep fixes.”

“Sometimes I even felt like he dated me as part of his plan, like they were going to have a checklist on the application, and one of the things to tick off was going to be, "Do you have a reasonably intelligent girlfriend who shares your aspirations, and who is fully prepared to accept your limited availability?”

“One person's crazy is another person's sane, I guess.”

“Hey! Jack the Wanker! Over here! I want your autograph!”

“Irony is the word I forget the meaning of immediately after I look it up, but I kind of feel like I live in a constant state of it.”

“It was like the entire world was colluding to make me feel insane, and it was doing a really good job.”

“Why are Americans so fascinated by Ireland?” Keith asked... “you all think you’re Irish. What’s the appeal? Do you like the accent more? Is it all the magical rocks? Oh, look, a lep­rechaun...”

“And what else is she?" Jerome asked. Jazza didn't offer any reply so I chimed in with, "A bitchweasel?""A bitchweasel!" Jazza's face lit up. "She's a bitchweasel! I love my new roommate.”

“I don't mind bigots. You're allowed to be bigoted, if that makes you happy. Just do it at home. And not around the children.”

“It rang and it rand and it rang. I looked at the screen one last time, then at Stuart, and then I reached my arm back and threw the phone as hard as I could (sadly, not that far), and it vanished into the snow. The eight-year-olds, who were truly fascinated with our every move at this point, chased after it. 'Lost it,' I said. 'Whoops.”

“And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I'm armed.”

“My final word: don't follow your dreams . . . chase them. With a stick, or a shovel, or whatever you have handy. Get that [bleep]ing dream!”

“Tell me what you want, what you really, really want," he said."Braiiinnnnssss," we said in unison.”

“I decided to deflect her attitude by giving a long, Southern answer. I come from people who know how to draw things out. Annoy a Southerner, and we will drain away the moments of your life with our slow, detailed replies until you are nothing but a husk of your former self and that much closer to death.”

“It was very pretty. It also made Marlene look very demure, which she probably hated. Ideally, Marlene probably wanted an outfit that had a special holder for a gun.”

“Lies are a tremendous karmic setback. Keep it up and you'll come back in the next life as something without a spine. You're not fine. And you don't have to be fine.”

“New start or not, there was a line to be drawn, and that line was singing musicals to yourself as serious psychological motivation.”

“Fear can’t hurt you,” she said. “When it washes over you, give it no power. It’s a snake with no venom. Remember that. That knowledge can save you.”

“Idea meets execution. Feeling becomes action. I don't know why people find this idea so hard to get. I mean, you can throw any two people together, it doesn't mean they'll fall in love. Everyone knows this. No one quite understands how it works. It's just those people, where they are in their lives, how circumstance throws them together. Sure, it's happened before, but never quite in that way. Maybe they seem to come together all wrong. Maybe they've loved others. Maybe they don't always do right by each other...but it's still there, the love. The event. And no one would dare criticize it just because it's common, it's a little asymmetrical, and anyone can do it. It is unique. It is theirs. It is beautiful. They have made something that has been made a million times before and has also never existed before that moment.”

“They weren't pressed together as closely as normal, but his shoulder bumped hers, then remained there. It was very subtle, and possibly even accidental, but it was enough.”

“It took a lot of women like that, a lot of women who said "I'm not going to do what you expect me to do, because you have no idea what I'm capable of. I'm going to get dirty and use tools and live the way I want" to move the world forward.”

“Top Trumps appeared to be a game in which you got cards, and the cards had a picture (in this case, of a horse), and told you all kinds of stats for that horse, how fast it was, how big it was, etc. Whoever had the better horse won both the cards. You repeated this until someone had all the cards. So, basically it was exactly like high school, except it only took three minutes. Which was really a bit more humane, if you thought about it.”

“She couldn't take her eyes off the boxers. Mostly, she had a view of the back, but he turned halfway when he looked over. She commanded herself not to look at the front flap, which, of course, was exactly what she honed in on.He spit and put his mouth under the tap to get some water. All while just wearing underwear. All while she just stared at the crucial spot of the Action Pants.”

“Who runs a combination cat shelter and hostel?" Keith asked. "With the cat shelter being the primary function? Only people who want to kill you with an axe and then put you in the garden and build a shed on you, that's who.”

“We're going to die," Keith said, the moment he was gone. "This man is a serial killer. We're going to die, and he's going to bury us in his garden and build a shed on us.”

“You want to play?" Ellis yelled. "All right, then! I played a lot of video games as a kid, bitches!""There!" Oliver yelled. "That way! Toward Boulevard Périphérique. There! There!"The car swerved abruptly to the right. Ginny heard Keith swear for a solid ten seconds.”

“He had let Aunt Peg live in his house and married her, so clearly he had a thing for flaky American types who liked to sneak off in the dead of night. That was, as Ginny remembered it, how America won the Revolution in the first place. The English walked around in bright red coats in straight lines and took breaks for tea, and the Americans snuck around dressed in rags and hid in trees and stole their horses. Or something. Whatever. She had to do this-it was her birthright. It was what George Washington would have wanted.”

“She's gone. Been gone for ages. They split up right after you left. That's why the grass out front started growing again.""He's got a new girlfriend?" she said quietly. "Thank god. You must be happy.""Yeah. He does. It's a relief. She's a lot nicer. But then, your average angry snake is nicer than Fiona. I'm sure she's happier wherever she is now, burning orphans or whatever she does with her time.”

“WORTH IT and perfect are different things. No one’s perfect, yet in romance, everyone becomes WORTH IT. And that’s the trick.”

“I love Ginny's expedition!”

“Listen, haircut...'Did you just call me haircut?' he asked.Yes. You know there's no reason we can't go online. It's crazy.'Why'd you call me haircut?' he asked, touching his hair. 'Is it because I have a great haircut?'You figure it out,' she answered.-Clio and Aiden, Girl At Sea by Maureen Johnson”

“Salt. Wound. Together at last.”

“Sometimes it is worth any amount of suffering just to prevent giving your parents the opportunity to be right.”

“This pool is a triumph of imagination. That's how you win at life, Gin. You have to imagine your way through. Never say something can't be done. There's always a solution, even if it's weird.”

“Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn't take half a semester to read one book of poems... that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him.”

“It's always easier to say good-bye when you know it's just a prelude to hello.”

“You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe out what came before.”

“The funny thing about stop signs is that they're also start signs.”

“It was probably a good idea to have you possible future stepmother think you were a little nuts. It would keep her on her toes and dissuade her from trying to sit down and have touchy-feely talks. Not that she expected that from Julia. Julia looked like she might head-butt people in meetings.”

“Even though she had been warned, she tripped over the bike. She probably tripped because she'd been warned and was telling herself not to trip over the bike. She did that sometimes. It was often easier not to know what obstacles were in the way.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?" he asked.It was a good question.”

“People would say that it's impossible to have a private pool in the city, unless you were some sort of rich mogul and had it on the roof of your penthouse or something. But it's not illegal to have a really clean dumpster, and if you want to fill it with water, and if you want to get in it... well, that's your prerogative. People always say they can't do things, that they're impossible. They just haven't been creative enough. This pool is a triumph of imagination. That's how you win at life, Gin. You have to imagine your way through. Never say something can't be done. There's always a solution, even if it's weird.”

“I never shut up'Yes, you do'Not much'I could make you shut up'Oh, yeah?...How?”

“She wasn't only gay, she was a gay elf.”

“She was standing in the airport of Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H.Was she an H? Was H "hers"? It could just as easily be "his". Or "Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All”