Halse Anderson Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Halse Anderson Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
What do you miss about being alive?" The sound of my mom singing, a little off-key. The way my dad went to all my swim meets and I could hear his whistle when my head was underwater, even if he did yell at me afterward for not trying harder. I miss going to the library. I miss the smell of clothes fresh out of the dryer. I miss diving off the highest board and nailing the landing. I miss waffles" - p. 272.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I can't let me hear this, but it's too late. The facts sneak in and stab me.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Light up the stars in your brain, electrify your body, buckle on your smile, and everybody will love you again.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I scared myself, because once you've thought long and hard enough about doing something that is colossally stupid, you feel like you've actually done it, and then you're never quite sure what your limits are.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Sometimes being an adult means doing the right thing, even if it's not what you want.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Life was a battle, and Mother a tired and bitter captain— Laurie Halse Anderson
The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing-all classic. Phase One signs of deliria.— Laurie Halse Anderson
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?— Laurie Halse Anderson
I would never be popular. I didn't want to be; I liked being shy. I'd never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest. By eighth grade you start to figure out your limits.— Laurie Halse Anderson
When I was a real girl, my mother fed me her glass dreams one spoonful at a time. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Duke. Undergrad. Med school. Internship, residency, God. She'd brush my hair and braid it with long words, weaving the Latin roots and Greek branches into my head so memorizing anatomy would come easy.— Laurie Halse Anderson
She laid land mines in my skill that detonated weeks later.— Laurie Halse Anderson
She looks like a china doll," observed Grandfather as we departed. "I will break just as easily," I muttered.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I used to dream about bringing a knife to therapy and slicing her into pork chop-sized pieces.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I spent the last Friday of summer vacation spreading hot, sticky tar across the roof of George Washington High. My companions were Dopey, Toothless, and Joe, the brain surgeons in charge of building maintenance. At least they were getting paid. I was working forty feet above the ground, breathing in sulfur fumes from Satan's vomitorium, for free.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Character building, my father said.
Mandatory community service, the judge said. Court-ordered restitution for the Foul Deed. He nailed me with the bill for the damage I had done, which meant I had to sell my car and bust my hump at a landscaping company all summer. Oh, and he gave me six months of meetings with a probation officer who thought I was a waste of human flesh.
Still, it was better than jail.
I pushed the mop back and forth, trying to coat the seams evenly. We didn't want any rain getting into the building and destroying the classrooms. Didn't want to hurt the school. No, sir, we sure didn't.
I sent a simple smiley face, because my phone did not have a smiley face that was wrapping her hands around her own throat and beating her head against a wall.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Once upon a time there was an eighteen-year-old girl who dragged her butt out of bed and hauled it all the way to school on a sunny day in May.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Dead girl walking" the boys say in the halls.— Laurie Halse Anderson
"Tell us your secrets" the girls whisper, one toilet to another.
"I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
I knit the afternoon away. I knit reasons for Elijah to come back. I knit apologies for Emma. I knit angry knots and slipped stitches for every mistake I ever made, and I knit wet, swollen stitches that look awful. I knit the sun down.— Laurie Halse Anderson
We swore sacred oaths to be strong and to save the planet and to be friends forever.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Having a friend made everything else suck less.— Laurie Halse Anderson
What if a king made bad laws; laws so unnatural that a country broke them by declaring its freedom?" He threw his arms in the air. "Now you are spouting nonsense. Two slaves running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England. Not the same at all." "How is it then that the British offer freedom to escaped slaves, but the Patriots don't?— Laurie Halse Anderson
I won the wintergirl trip over the border into dangerland.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?— Laurie Halse Anderson
It was hard to know how to play the game when the rules kept changing.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Mr Freeman: "Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag." He sticks his finger down his throat. "The next time you work on your trees, don't think about trees. Think about love, or hate, or joy, or pain- whatever makes you feel something, makes your palms sweat, or your toes curl. Focus on that feeling.— Laurie Halse Anderson
When people don't express themselves, they die on piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside- walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know.
Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home.— Laurie Halse Anderson
There is no safer. There's not even safe, never has been.— Laurie Halse Anderson
IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding.— Laurie Halse Anderson
If everyone was really having sex, they why was it paradoxically a hush-hush-whisper thing and a scream-it-online-and -in-the-cafeteria thing? If everyone was really having sex, why weren't more girls sporting baby bumps? I know the statistics.— Laurie Halse Anderson
If I ever form my own clan, we'll be the Anti-Cheerleaders. We will not sit in the bleachers. We will wander underneath them and commit mild acts of mayhem.— Laurie Halse Anderson
He doesn't see my breasts or my waist or my hips. He only sees the nightmare.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Shards of glass slip down the wall and into the sink. IT pulls away from me, puzzled. I reach in and wrap my fingers around a triangle of glass. I hold it to Andy Evans's neck. He freezes. I push just hard enough to raise one drop of blood. He raises his arms over his head. My hand quivers. I want to insert the glass all the way through his throat, I want to hear him scream. I look up. I see the stubble on his chin, a fleck of white in the corner of his mouth. His lips are paralyzed. He cannot speak. That's good enough.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Me: I said no.
No wonder the zombies were crazy. They thought they were supposed to practice breeding before they learned how to do their own laundry. They talked about it, thought about it, maybe did it, all while going through the motions of attending class and learning stuff so that they could go forth and become productive adults. Whatever that was supposed to mean.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I'm fighting the shock of having a guest in my room. I almost kick her out because it's going to hurt too much when my room is empty again.— Laurie Halse Anderson
What do I want?— Laurie Halse Anderson
The answer to that question does not exist.
Mr. Freeman sighs. No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you!— Laurie Halse Anderson
There was a loud shuffling above. A line of redcoats took their position at the edge of the ravine and aimed down at the rebels.— Laurie Halse Anderson
"Present!" the British officer screamed to his men.
"Present!" yelled the American officer. His men brought the butts of their muskets up to their shoulders and sighted down the long barrels, ready to shoot and kill.
I pressed my face into the earth, unable to plan a course of escape. My mind would not be mastered and thought only of the wretched, lying, foul, silly girl who was the cause of everything.
I thought of Isabel and I missed her.
"FIRE!
Like most blacks in Philadelphia, Eliza was free. She said Philadelphia was the best city for freed slaves or freeborn Africans.— Laurie Halse Anderson
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.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I nod like I'm listening,like we're communicating, and she never knows the difference.— Laurie Halse Anderson
The girl reflected back from the window in front of me has poinsettias growing out of her belly and head. She's the shape of a breakfast-link sausage standing on broomstick legs, her arms made from twigs, her face blurred with an eraser. I know that this is me, but it's not me, not really. I don't know what I look like. I can't remember how to look.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I know how bad you feel. Trapped," she says. "It gets better, I promise. So much better.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I have survived. I am here.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Had she ever enjoyed anything? Had every day been a struggle? Perhaps death would be a release, a rest for the weary.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don't have anyone to sit with.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Do you know how much women loathe it when guys think every show of negative emotion is tied to our menstrual cycle, like we're sheep or something?— Laurie Halse Anderson
I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I scurry out to the three-way mirror. With an extra-large sweatshirt over the top, you can hardly tell that they are Effert's jeans. Still no Mom. I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections of reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Are you a man-whore? I asked as the loudest group of them teetered away on their high heels. (High heels? Really? At seven thirty in the morning? Shouldn't you actually have breasts before you start wearing heels?)— Laurie Halse Anderson
I knew how much it hurt to be the daughter of people who can't see you, not even if you are standing in front of them stomping your feet.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.— Laurie Halse Anderson
The world turns upside down every day.— Laurie Halse Anderson
What did it feel like to die? Was it a peaceful sleep? Some thought it was full of either trumpet-blowing angels or angry devils. Perhaps I was already dead.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Fracture lines etch the surface of the glass box as if a body fell from the sky and landed on it.— Laurie Halse Anderson
She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. "You're lost!" "You're angry!" "You're in the wrong school!" "You're in the wrong country!" "You're on the wrong planet!— Laurie Halse Anderson
I have gotten one question repeatedly from young men. These are guys who liked the book, but they are honestly confused. They ask me why Melinda was so upset about being raped.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Killing people is easier than it should be." Dad put on his beret. "Staying alive is harder.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I am locked into the mirror and there is no door out.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I can't face the idea of riding home on a busful of sweaty, smiling teeth sucking up my oxygen.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Her eyes were tired, but we're seniors. All seniors have dead eyes.— Laurie Halse Anderson
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.— Laurie Halse Anderson
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.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I can't do everything for you. You must walk alone to find your soul.— Laurie Halse Anderson
The one good thing about being kind of shy is that nobody bugs you when you want to be left alone.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I kissed him until everything that hurt inside me melted into a pool of black water so deep I couldn't touch the bottom. As long as I was touching him, I wouldn't drown.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I've written in every imaginable location; a repurposed closet, the kitchen table, the bleachers while my kids had basketball practice, the front seat of the car when they were at soccer. In airports. On trains. In the break room when I was supposed to be wolfing down dinner. In the back of classrooms when I was supposed to be paying attention.— Laurie Halse Anderson
That can be the most painstaking aspect of being a teen, figuring out what the world really looks like. If you find someone in a book, you know you're not alone and that's what's so comforting about books.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice if I just stopped talking.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears?— Laurie Halse Anderson
And then a new screen, one I had never seen before, never even heard of popped up. It gave me a choice. I could become the new Lord of Darkness myself, or I could take a gamble and be reincarnated. I chose wisely.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. 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 ...— Laurie Halse Anderson
The guidance counselor convinces them I need a reward-a chew toy or something.— Laurie Halse Anderson
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.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I dare you to punch me," I said.— Laurie Halse Anderson
"You? Dare me?" He was laughing too hard to say anything else.
I shove him. "I double-dare you. If you don't have the guts to do it, you're a weenie." I shove again, harder. "If you do, you're an even bigger weenie because it's harder to take a punch than to give one.
Be careful what you wish for. There's always a catch.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I needed to hear the world but didn't want the world to know I was listening.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Picasso." He whispers like a priest. "Picasso. Who saw the truth. Who painted the truth, molded it, ripped from the earth with two angry hands.— Laurie Halse Anderson
The light beyond my eyes flashflashflashes with a hundred futures for me. Doctor. Ship's captain. Forest ranger. Librarian. Beloved of that man or that women or those children or those people who voted for me or who painted my picture. Poet. Acrobat. Engineer. Friend. Guardian. Avenging whirlwind. A million futures— Laurie Halse Anderson
not all pretty, not all long, but all of them mine. I do have a choice - p. 271
I embarked on a campaign of honey and kindness, which, if you've never tried it, is very hard to do with someone who thinks you are chickenhearted and has in the past called you a poxy sluggard. It is especially hard if every day you are plagued with fear about what might happen next.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Why bother trying? What was the point? So I could go to some suck-ass college, get a diploma, march out into a job that I hated, marry a pretty girl who would want to divorce me, but then she wouldn't because we'd have kids, so instead she'd be the angry woman at the other end of the kitchen table, and the kids would grow up watching this, until one day I'd look at my son and he'd look just like that face in the bathroom mirror?— Laurie Halse Anderson
If that was life, then it was twisted.
Look at the stupid, poor people. Look at the stupid, poor, burned-out people. Look at the stupid, poor, burned-out people, look at their dead baby. It's death porn for the masses.— Laurie Halse Anderson
That fellow was like all of us: descended from good people who were stolen from their families and country, sailed over the sea, and forced into slavery. 'We don't let them steal our dignity,' that preacher said. Richard, his name was. He said they cannot steal our honor, our strength, or our love." "True words," I said. "Do you know what he said about this America?" Henry asked. I shook my head. "Remember, lads?" Henry asked his mates. "Join with me. He said, 'This land . . .'" A half dozen voices spoke with Henry, strong black men sharing the preacher's words like a hymn or a prayer. "'Which we have watered with our tears and our blood, is now our mother country.'" The words drifted up to the stars with the sparks from the fire. "We go to war, Missus Isabel," Henry added, "in order to make our mother country, this land, free for everyone.— Laurie Halse Anderson
No. Absolutely not. I forbid it. You'll have nightmares."— Laurie Halse Anderson
"She was my friend! You must allow me. Why are you so horrid?"
As soon as the angry words were out of my mouth, I knew I had gone too far.
"Matilda!" Mother rose from her chair. "You are forbidden to pseak to me in that tone! Apologize at once.
The merry-go-round is spinning too fast. I want to get off. I want to close my eyes, or just blink.— Laurie Halse Anderson
The good soldier swears to kill. Fire the cannon, mount the barricade, lock and load. Smell your brother's blood on your shirt. Wipe your sister's brains off your face. Die, if you have to, so they'll live. Kill to keep your people alive, live to kill some more.— Laurie Halse Anderson
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.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Maybe I'll be an artist if I grow up.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Eating was hard. Breathing was hard. Living was hardest.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I'm not wearing this!" I shouted.— Laurie Halse Anderson
"Wear it or die," Mom shouted back.
The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I want to make a memorial for our turkey. Never has a bird been so tortured to provide such a lousy dinner.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what's left sound natural.— Laurie Halse Anderson
They were coming, on wings from far away, all the pictures and voices, smells, tastes, all the everything from the past was flying toward me as fast as it could.— Laurie Halse Anderson
I'd treat myself to a reading marathon all weekend. All the ice cream I could eat, all the pages I could read. Heaven.— Laurie Halse Anderson
This is not our fight', the old man said. 'British or American, that is not the choice. You must choose your own side, find your road through the valley of darkness that will lead you to the river Jordan ... Look hard for your river Jordan, my child. You'll find it.— Laurie Halse Anderson
Maybe your son didn't get that job because he's not good enough. Or he's lazy. Or the other guy was better than him, no matter what his skin color. I think the white people who have been here for two hundred years are the ones pulling down the country. They don't know how to work - they've had it too easy— Laurie Halse Anderson
You know what's not sexy?" I pushed his hand away. "Barbies. Barbies are not sexy."— Laurie Halse Anderson
"But I bought condoms," he said. "I even practiced putting one on!"
The lost-puppy look on his face made me smile. "I'm proud of you, Boner Man, but that's not enough.
I make it through the first two weeks of school without a nuclear meltdown.— Laurie Halse Anderson
We need more holidays to keep the social studies teachers on track.— Laurie Halse Anderson
