Quotes from Andrew Smith

Nonsense. You aren't alive to begin with," I pointed out. "Suck it up and make the best of it, Milo. The future is bright, I assure you." "We come into existence, and we float through space, doomed, until we all die horribly. No reason to live at all." Milo the busboy wept uncontrollably. He probably knew more than I did, but who can say?

Again, for the record, let me restate: you can't be rude to a coffee grinder and only an idiot would thank it for pulverizing beans. But you could, and probably should, unplug it if it doesn't shut up.

And never farting pointed to guilt in the courthouse of my mind.

If it's impossible to understand how I could kick a weeping, torn-in-half cog that was gushing something that looked like tapioca pudding and whale semen on my nice shiny space suit, then you probably never kicked a car for getting a flat tire, or slapped a television remote when the batteries were getting weak, in which case you'll never understand what it means or meant to be a human.

I don't just let anyone find me, you know?

The planet of humans and dogs spins and sails, spins and sails. There is nothing I can do about it. Things keep moving. The knackery never shuts down.

History will show that patient boys with a sense of humor, who can dance, tend to have more opportunities to participate in the evolution of the species than boys who give up and mope quietly on the sidelines

It's still home, Cager, and there's something about home, no matter how untidy we've left it.

And maybe that's the whole point, after all - that everyone of us who existed spent all those limitless days over the thousands of centuries we were here just trying to figure out what it meant to be us. The mousetrap trigger is this precise point: Pour the word us into the coding of a human, and we immediately discount as inferior or useless all the not-us things in the universe. Are you one of us?

Because, in an empty bedroom with creaky old wood floors, it is a natural human response to just stand there and shift your weight from foot to foot, and think about sex.

I read somewhere that human beings are genetically predisposed to record history.

I didn't like seeing books damaged. I'd seen enough burned-out schoolhouses and libraries in my first life.

Innocence is the one thing you can't re-create, can only parody.

History shows that lots of shit happens to Polish boys when they are in seventh grade. I do not know why, but that is not my job. My job is saying what. The shit that happens to us Polish boys is casually related to the bags under our eyes.

Here are five bullets for the boys on the boat. Here is one more for the saint.

Of course, Andrzej never managed to leave Iowa, but the idea was good and romantic. That's what all Polish boys like when they are seventeen years old: Romantic ideas and somewhere to go.

I hold together pretty well, considering how much my atoms have been through.

Andrew Szerba, whose Polish name was my name, Andrzej, also had bags under his eyes. Andrzej means man in Polish boy names.

I think it is always appropriate to end a conversation about sperm with a sweaty handshake.

I would die for Conner Kirk. Sometimes, I think I have died for him dozens of times, over and over again.

Monsters make monsters make monsters.

Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap

Good books are always about everything.

It is the history of the end of the world. All real histories will be about everything, and they will stretch to the end of the world.