Quotes from Cynthia Voigt

She felt funny, strange, making up lies as quickly and smoothly as if she'd been doing it all her life.

Orien," Birle protested again. "You can stay if you must." Orien's cheeks were hollow with hunger and he had little strength for anger. "But I wish you'd come. I don't know how long it would be before I could come back for you." So she followed him, since he would return for her.

It was almost as if he'd been a ghost in all those rooms, all those days, a ghost in his own life.

She held her right hand out to Elske, as if they were two merchants closing on a sale, and she bowed her head to Elske, as if they were two swordsmen ending a match, and she looked Elske in the eye, as if they were Wolfer captains, about to risk their lives in battle.

Orien might easily have been a different kind of man, living as he had, Birle thought.

He had locked her out of his mind and out of his life. She could no longer get through to him, to make him feel the way she used to. He just wanted to forget about her and the way she played on his feelings — the same way she used to play on the guitar, he thought, remembering for a minute. He knew now just how badly she had played the guitar.

The rest of them were pretty sure they understood things, and that made them bad listeners.

Dicey awoke the next morning with the sense that she was ready to solve problems, the way you often do, as if the time of sleep were a long journey to a distant country where alterations in geographical formations, in light, in ways of living, in language even, enable you to see your own world more clearly.

People may be the ruin of their own lives, but it's other people that get them started. -Mumma

It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms.

She couldn't get any farther away inside from her skin. She couldn't get away.

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls' hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.

But I'll tell you something else, too. Something I've learned, the hard way. I guess"—Gram laughed a little—"I'm the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way. You've got to hold on. Hold on to people. They can get away from you. It's not always going to be fun, but if you don't—hold on—then you lose them.

I got to thinking—when it was too late—you have to reach out to people. To your family, too. You can't just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don't care enough, you forget about them, if you can.

I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I'm not anymore.

You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?

Mina wanted some of the kind of love Momma gave to her children, where love was the first and deepest thing, and the questions came later and the answers wouldn't matter much measured up against the love.

Why doesn't momma come back?

People can be unimaginably foolish...and they can be unimaginably grand, at times.

It's never been today before.

People had no more choice than animals about the burdens they carried.

Hiding under the bed doesn't make the worry stop.

a really good friend, the kind of friend who - when they were together both of them were more able to be who they really were.

I felt that the world itself had changed and that it would never be steady under my feet again. I felt I understood nothing of people and had no way to learn. I felt fear. Until you have felt fear, you cannot imagine it. Once you have really felt it, you know that all your earlier nervousness was but a pale shadow.