Quote collection
525 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes."
"You can't tell me what to feel"
"I didn't even know a heart could beat so loudly...it reminds me of an Edgar Allen Poe story we had to read in one of our...classes...it's supposed to be a story about guilt and the dangers of civil disobedience, but when I first read it I thought it seemed kind of lame and melodramatic. Now I get it, though. Poe must have snuck out a lot when he was young."
"Mistake, mistake, mistake. A strange word: stinging, somehow."
"But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven."
"It is a beautiful world for the people who get to play the fist."
"Step on a crack , you'll break your mama's back. Step on a stone, you'll end up all alone. Step on a stick, you're bound to get the Sick. Watch where you tread, you'll bring out all the dead. - A common children's playground chant, usually accompanied by jumping rope or clapping."
"The worst is knowing I can't tell anybody what's happening -or what's happened- to me. Not even my mom."
"I'm so tired after dinner I fall asleep with my clothes on, almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and so I forget to ask God, in my prayers, to keep me from waking up."
"You have to learn that people are always listening."
"In my head I try and reach back, through the fence, past the smoke; I try and grab his hand and pull. Alex, come back. There is nothing to do but sink. The hours close around me, encase me completely, like a tomb."
"My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate."
"This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive."
"As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies."
"Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums."
"For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point - last summer? last year? - she became beautiful."
"If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now."
"Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you."
"Still, the vivid green of the grass-where the grass is actually managing to assert itself through the dirt-seems out of place. This seems like a place where the sun should never shine: a place on the edge, at the limit, a place completely removed from time and happiness and life."
"He's stuck with me and I'm stuck with him. We're stuck. That's what growing up is all about, I guess."