Quotes from John Barnes

By noon everyone had heard that I had spent the night with Marti in a hotel room and when the cops came by, with our mothers, I had asked for time to get dressed. It was also all over the school that I had deliberately provoked Gratz and lived to tell of it, and that Paul had knocked me flat. And on top of that, Spooky Darla had given me a thermonuclear kiss in public. No getting away from it: I was now Public Madman Number One.

The way you can tell there's democracy going on is that nothing gets done.

Clarity believes in all of that. Because she's - well, you know her. Generous and kind and loves everyone - because she's that way, those ideas take on a particularly important meaning to her. She doesn't know... that it wasn't that she was good and kind because of the words, but that the words meant those things because she was good and kind.

A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it's time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind--made up properly, knowing what it knows and on what basis it knows it--is open. People close an undecided mind because they're trying to protect those sore uncertainties from getting bumped and scraped.

So we fell asleep holding hands. If married couples got to do this all the time, shit if I could understand how there were ever divorces, or even fights.

I think everyone always has time to suffer.

Can I ask you something personal?" Six inches but I tell everyone eight.

Pain only matters when it happens to someone important.

It wasn't that funny, but I laughed. There wouldn't be much laughter in the world if people didn't like each other, because there sure as shit aren't that many good jokes.

You know, when someone hurts my feelings, somehow it does not comfort me to know that it was deliberate... On the other hand, knowing that someone else thinks they are assholes helps a great deal." "I think that's some kind of rule for the universe.

once you were in, they put a note in your file that said you were in therapy, and all your teachers saw that file. They might as well have tattooed CRAZY on your forehead. The next year every teacher would be watching you for the first weird thing you did—and has there ever been a kid who never does anything an adult considers weird?

People who put principles before people are people who hate people. They don't much care about how well it works, just about how right it is … they may even like it better if it inflicts enough pain.

There's a rule or something that if a girl can crack you up, you have to do what she says.

This is not the way these tales end," Calliope said firmly. "This is not the way that things end when they get to be tales," Amatus said, "but since ours is not yet told, we cannot count on it. There were a hundred dead princes on the thorns outside Sleeping Beauty's castle, and I'm sure many of them were splendid fellows.

Marti wasn't the type to give up without a fight, especially not if she was very afraid - some people are like that. They lean into the fear.

Future Farmers of America. Group who take ag classes and are going to inherit the farm. Hot shit around here, they have a couple guys in every clique, and they stick together, 'cause they know they'll be seeing each other every week for the next sixty years.

I wondered if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air?

Useless people are not improved by giving them the impression they are useful.

I've been thinking," he said. "Which is not an easy thing for a teacher to admit to.

Supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn't true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul's hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.

I realized after I got Jesus, I'd marry "that good woman who put me right with the Lord, got me away from the bottle and taught me what life is really all about." Which was to say, some church girl that resembles a pile of loose fat upholstered with pale goopy skin, and whose whole life is chocolate cake and visiting her sister.

Romney sounds like he wants to be the nice uncle in a sitcom, Santorum sounds like he wants to be a twelfth-century archbishop, Gingrich sounds like he wants to go to outer space, and Paul sounds like he came from there.

Don't underrate ordinary human decency," Josh said quietly. "There's more of heaven in a guy who hands a cold soda to a hot, tired panhandler than there is in fifty moral philosophers.

I gave up drinking, and the next time I saw Bonny at a party, she was mad at me about that too, and went off and made out all night with Chip Neminech, the tackle who demonstrated that not only is there no I in team, there's no Q, either. I suppose, given that my mother was a girl, I shouldn't have been surprised that some of them could get pretty weird.