Quotes from Jack Gantos

...who proved that you don't have to do what your parents want, or what your boyfriend wants, for you to be happy. You just have to be yourself, for there is no love greater than self love

Each time I read a book, I cataloged the parts that struck me dumb with envy and admiration for their beauty and power and truth.

But it was the kind of story that doesn't go away after the first time you tell it so you have to tell it over and over until it goes away for good. If it ever can.

I was always a liar. But one thing I failed to realize about being a liar is that you know when you are deceiving someone else, but when you deceive yourself you believe you are telling the truth.

They say love is blind, but for me it's the opposite. It makes me see the good in him, too, which is why I can never hate him.' --Mom (Fran)

Be suspicious of history that is written by the conquerors.

pooped all over the carpet, eaten the slippers, and attacked the mailman, and was now being sent to obedience school.

You're a fast learner," she remarked. "You've gone from slowpoke to safety hazard in one day.

Your pony, he said as he stomped toward me. "I'm the farrier who is here to fix your pony." "I thought you were a Hells Angel," I said. "I used to be," he replied. "But fighting all the time and being really drunk and nasty got boring. So now I just take care of animals.

Miss Volker," I said about as politely as I knew how, "do you think you will outlast the rest of these original people?" "I have to," she said. "I made a promise to Eleanor Roosevelt to see them to their graves, and I can't drop dead on the job—so let's get going.

Well, don't fart or you'll scare the deer," he continued seriously. "They have very sensitive noses and ears.

chair wouldn't rock. So I heaved myself from side to side. It still didn't move. I gripped the arms and jerked myself around and hung way out over the arms like some rodeo rider on a wild bull.

Eventually, her designed genetic material will be implanted into my egg, which first would have had my genetic material removed. Then my mother could become my baby. And someday, when I get old, I can become her baby. Then she will be mine, and I will be hers.

when we passed the Hells Angels clubhouse they were giving cans of beer out to little kids. "Repeat after me," ordered a drunken Hells Angel dressed as a Viking warrior. "When I grow up I'm going to be a badass.

I know I'm not perfect, but I didn't think it was fair that they told me one thing and wrote down another.

Money is just a way of measuring work, but you don't need money if everyone agrees that trading one kind of work for another will do just as well.

These folks zigged when the rest of the world zagged. And once you cross the line, there's no coming back. Mark my words.

We are not so much defined by the wars we fight across the globe, but by the wars we have fought within ourselves as a nation.

I wish," she continued, turning back to herself, "that there was a path of words I could walk down and they would lead me into a grotto pool where I could re-purify myself and return to the girl I was. But there isn't a path, or even a girl. She's gone, and I'm stuck trying to invent who I want to be, and I'm finding that figuring out who I want to be is so much harder than just being who I was when I was a little kid.

There were tiny loaves for dolls, and warm dinner rolls, and long French bread, and braided rings of bread, and thick loaves as big and round as wagon wheels, and even entire wheat-colored cottages of crusty bread which when you lived in them were more like yeasty caves in a gigantic mountain of bread, and all you had to do in order to feed your self in heaven was pull a hank of soft, moist bread right out of the wall.

Well I'm looking at history," she said, pointing at me. "You used to be a friend, but now you stink as a friend! I came here to give you a second chance and you make me smell the crotch of an old book.

I might have been slight-but I was smart and cagey.

Title Page Dedication

An obit for a house?" he questioned as he relit his pipe. "Has she lost her mind?" "No," I said. "She just speaks her mind." "Amen to that," he remarked.