Ned Vizzini

“That's my school. I worked harder to get in than I did for anything else, ever. I went there because, coming out of it, I'd be able to be President. Or a lawyer. Rich, that's the point. Rich and successful. And look where it got me. One stupid year and here I am with not one, but two bracelets on my wrist, next to a shrink in a room adjacent to a hall where there's a guy named Human Being walking around. If I keep doing this for three more years, where will I be? I'll be a complete loser. And what If I keep on? What if I do okay, live with the depression, get into College, do College, go to Grad School, get the Job, get the Money, get Kids and a Wife and a Nice Car? What kind of crap will I be in then? I'll be completely crazy.”

“I know a lot of famous people didn't do well at school, like James Brown; he dropped out in fifth grade to be an entertainer, I respect that... but that's not going to be me. I'm not going to be able to do anything but work as hard as possible all the time and compete with everyone I know all the time to make it.”

“It's a talent I've developed-one thing I've learned recently. How to think nothing. Here's the trick: don't have any interest in the world around you, don't have any hope for the future, and be warm”

“Some days I woke up and got out of bed and brushed my teeth like any normal human being; some days I woke up and lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and wondered what the hell the point was of getting out of bed and brushing my teeth like any normal human being.”

“Just thoughts of what I have to do. Homework. And it comes up to my brain and I look at it and think "I'm not going to be able to do that" and then it cycles back down and the next one comes up. And then things come up like "You should be doing more extracurricular activities" because I should, I don't do near enough, and that gets pushed down and it's replaced with the big one: "What college are you going into, Craig?" which is like the doomsday question.”

“Who hasn't thought about killing themselves, as a kid? How can you grow up in this world and not think about it? It's an option taken by a lot of successful people: Ernest Hemingway, Socrates, Jesus. Even before high school, I thought that it would be a cool thing to do if I ever got really famous. If I kept making my maps, for instance, and some art collector came across them and decided to make them worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if I killed myself at the height of that, they'd be worth millions of dollars, and I wouldn't be responsible for them anymore. I'd have left behind something that spoke for itself.”

“Why were the other kids doing better than me? Because they were better, that's why That's what I knew every time I sat down online or got on the subway to Aaron's house. Other people weren't smoking or jerking off, and those that were were gifted-able to live and compete at the same time. I wasn't gifted. Mom was wrong. I was just smart and I worked hard. I had fooled myself into thinking that was something important to the rest of the world. Other people were complicit in this ruse. Nobody had told me I was common.”

“I was happy about different things. I was happy because someday I'd be walking across this bridge looking at this city, owning some piece of it, being valuable here.”

“Why are you bothering? You've got an excuse. You've got bad blood. You must like living; I guess I would if I were you.”

“the party line is that some of the most profound truths about us are things that we stop saying in the middle, but i think they do it to make us feel important”

“Tentacles is my term — the Tentacles are the evil tasks that invade my life. Like, for example, my American History class last week, which necessitated me writing a paper on the weapons of the Revolutionary war, which necessitated me traveling to the Metropolitan Museum to check out some of the old guns, which necessitated me getting the subway, which necessitated me being away from my cell phone and email for 45 minutes, which meant that I didn’t get to respond to a mass mail sent out by my teacher asking who needed extra credit, which meant other kids snapped up the extra credit, which meant I wasn’t going to get a 98 in the class, which meant I wasn’t anywhere close to a 98.6 average (body temperature, that’s what you needed to get), which meant I wasn’t going to get into a Good College, which meant I wasn’t going to have a Good Job, which meant I wasn’t going to have health insurance, which meant I’d have to pay tremendous amounts of money for the shrinks and drugs my brain needed, which meant I wasn’t going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I’d feel ashamed, which meant I’d get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn’t get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing — homelessness. If you can’t get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.”

“You are blessed with a good mind. You just have to have confidence in it and talk when people call on you.”

“Do you even know who the enemy is?""I think... it's me".”

“Do you have difficulty sleeping?”“Sometimes not. When I do it’s bad, though. I lie there thinking about how everything I’ve done is a failure, death and failure, and there’s no hope for me except being homeless, because I’m never going to be able to hold a job because everyone else is so much smarter.”

“Because there's so much stuff out there that you have to do something to deal with it.”

“I wanted to tell people, "My depression is acting up today" as an excuse for not seeing them, but I never managed to pull it off.”

“That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy.”

“Honor? What do you care about honor? Honor gets people killed!' 'At least they die for something,' I say, and he doesn't protest further.”

“I picked Ember. After I started working with Mortin.' 'Why?' 'Because embers turn into flames.”

“How can you live without stars? What keeps you from thinking about yourself all the time?”

“My brother,' Mortin says as Leidan shuffles away. 'So much potential, wasted.' He takes a swig of beer. I wonder whose potential he really thinks is wasted. I look through his upturned drink at the walls and ceiling. Things look sadder when glimpsed through alcohol.”

“Someday someone is going to find this pelvis sexy or I'll never have children.”

“The wall is home base. The wall won't move. If I stand at the wall, I won't be expected to move. This is what it means to be a wallflower. Now I understand.”

“Misfortune is no excuse for cruelty.”

“Sometimes when you open a book, time stops.”

“I don't want to brag, but if I go through this, and I go back to camp, I'll have something unique to talk about. I can be like, 'Hey, not only am I not a virgin, I lost my virginity to a frog-headed exotic dancer.' Will that be something to brag about or something to be ashamed of?”

“I wish I was Dumbo the Octopus. Adapted to freezing deep-ocean temperatures, I’d flop around down there atpeace. The big concerns of my life would be what sort of bottom-coating slime to feed off of—that’s not so different from now—plus I wouldn’t haveany natural predators; then again, I don’t have any now, and that hasn’t done me a whole lot of good. But it suddenly makes sense: I’d like to beunder the sea, as an octopus.”

“its hard to talk when you want to kill yourself”

“Sometimes we call those girls sluts. Do you think she had a boyfriend when she was eight?”

“She's pretty." (It's amazing how girls can say this and make it the most withering insult.)”

“A person's relationship with food is one of their most important relationships.”

“I feel dead, wasted, awful, broken and useless. It's not the kind of feeling you forget.”

“One thing I've learnt recently: how to think nothing. Here's the trick: don't have any interest in the world around you, don't have any hope for the future, and be warm.”

“I'd feel wasted and burnt, having wasted my time and my body and my energy and y words and my soul.”

“IT's all about being able to live a sustainable life. I don't think I'm going to be able to have one.”

“I lie there thinking about how everything I've done is a failure, death and failure, and there's no hope for me except being homeless, because I'm never going to be able to hold a job because everyone else is so much smarter.”

“I think you run out of 'I love yous”

“I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human.”

“I want my brain to slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise.”

“Doc, I'm not afraid of dying; I'm only afraid of living, and I want to put this bayonet through my stomach,”

“I eat not because I want to, not because I have to overcome anything, not to prove myself to anyone, but because it's there. I eat because that's what people do. And somehow when the food is put in front of you by an institution, when there's a large gray force behind it and you don't have to thank anyone for it, you have the animal instinct to make it disappear,”

“I feel it in my pocket. I don't want to lose it. It's one of the only things that's making me me right now. Without my cell phone, who will I be? I won't have any friends because I don't have their numbers memorized. I'll barely have a family since I don't know their cell phone numbers, just their home line. I'll be like an animal.”

“The thought trail one another in my brain running from the back up to the front and dripping down again under my chin: I'm no one; I'll never make it in my life; I'm about to get revealed as a fake, I've already been revealed as a fake but I don't know it yet; I know I'm a fake and pretend not to. All the good thoughts - the normal ones, the ones that have occasionally surfaced since last fall - scramble out the front of my brain in terror of what lives in my neck and spine. This is the worst it'll ever be”

“There's so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I'm not and other people - younger people - are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting paid and winning scholarships and getting their lives in order. I'm still a nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?”

“That's what gets me through the day. Knowing that I could do it. That I'm strong enough to do it and I can get it done.”

“I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?”

“If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away”

“I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?”

“I'm young, but I'm already screwing up my life. I'm smart but not enough -- just smart enough to have problems.”

“They're sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they're important -- everybody knows that; the TV tells you so -- but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another.”