Quotes from Rebecca Stead

if you smile for no reason at all you will actually start to feel happy

People act like riddles are hard, but real life is harder. In real life, there are always more than two doors" -Sherm

Isn't that the whole idea?' I asked. 'It's supposed to stop them from being criminals!' She shook her head. 'That's not what I mean. A lot of people make bad mistakes. But being in jail can make them feel like a mistake is all they are. Like they aren't even people anymore.

There are people who will try to make you choose between who you are and who they want you to be. You have to watch out for those people.

Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other.

Em: I'm falling apart. That's what I'm trying to tell you Bridge: You're not falling apart. You're scared. Em: Isn't that the same thing? Bridge: No

Dad is looking at the bookshelves, deep in thought, deciding which book should go where. Once, Mom came home from work and discovered that he had turned all the books around so that the bindings were against the wall and the pages faced out. He said it was calming not to have all those words floating around and "creating static." Mom made him turn them back. She said it was too hard to find a book when she couldn't read the titles. Then she poured herself a big glass of wine.

I had watched them trade best friends, start wars, cry, trade back, make treaties, squeal and grab each other's arms in this fake-excited way, et cetera...

Life isn't something that happens to you. It's something you make yourself, all the time.

I wish I could see what would have hapenned if I hadn't told. You told me once that every time a decision is made, the universe splits into two. So now there's a universe in which I kept my mouth shut. But I can't see what it looks like.

Look, I know Mom talks about the big picture. She wants you to remember that you'll find new friends, that life is always changing, sometimes in really good ways. But life is also what's happening NOW, Georges. What Dallas and Carter are doing is happening NOW, and you can't just wait for it to be over. We have to do something about it. Now.

There are days when everything changes, and this was one of those days.

Thank you for showing me your planet.

Anyway,' Sherm said quietly, 'people fake stuff all the time.

I thought you left me." Alice was standing in front of the bathroom looking all wounded. "Me?" I said. "No way.

You can have it all, but you can't have it all at once.

We have lunch at ten-forty-five," Colin said. A stupidly early lunch. At our school, the older you get, the stupider your lunch period.

Let's say everyone has nine thousand things about themselves," Em had explained to Tab and Bridge in sixth grade, "and say two people fall in love because it seems like all their things match up. But what they don't know is that only like a thousand of their things actually match up. My mom says most people who get married don't even know those other eight thousand things about themselves yet. So it could happen to anyone.

With the right people, you can carry your boat and it doesn't even feel that heavy.

This is the world of pretend. We are artists and we are servants of the stage, and I take both jobs very seriously. As artists, we work as a collective—all for one and one for all. As servants, we work for thos who venture out alone, otherwise known as performers.

Life is where you sleep and what you see when you wake up in the morning, and who you tell about your weird dream, and what you eat for breakfast and who you eat it with.

And if you've got a voice, you might as well use it, right?

But at the exact same time I got nervous about that, I also got this other feeling, which I can only describe of as love for Annemarie's elevator.

Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore. She doesn't mean that it's a real veil. And it isn't about magic, or some idea that maybe God is looking right at you, or an angel is sitting next to you, or anything like that. Mom doesn't think in those ways. It's just her way of saying that most of the time, people get distracted by little stuff and ignore the big stuff.