Quotes from Laurie Halse Anderson

We need more holidays to keep the social studies teachers on track.

The playground was a war of girls versus boys and now I feel shame cuz some kids must have wanted to stand with the other team, and some must have wanted new teams entirely, but the world was drawn for us binary in clumsy chalk lines, and we'd try to do better when we were in charge.

I get caught up in the excitement and clap like a little girl. This is my mistake, thinking I belong. I should have bolted for home immediately. But I don't. I hang around. I want to be a part of it all.

Maybe that was why I wanted to slap so many of the zombies; they had no idea how freaking lucky they were. Lucky and ignorant, happy little rich kids who believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and thought that life was supposed to be fair.

It is easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school.

Precalculus was taught in dog whistle, a pitch too high to hear.

I thought of all the ancestors waiting at the water's edge for their stolen children to come home. Waiting and waiting and waiting . . .

How could men who liked cats be bad?

If everyone was really having sex, they why was it paradoxically a hush-hush-whisper thing and a scream-it-online-and -in-the-cafeteria thing? If everyone was really having sex, why weren't more girls sporting baby bumps? I know the statistics.

One had to be careful with elbows and boys

No wonder the zombies were crazy. They thought they were supposed to practice breeding before they learned how to do their own laundry. They talked about it, thought about it, maybe did it, all while going through the motions of attending class and learning stuff so that they could go forth and become productive adults. Whatever that was supposed to mean.

Light up the stars in your brain, electrify your body, buckle on your smile, and everybody will love you again.

A teacher (a good teacher) is composed of molecules of education and intelligence, bonded together by patience and passion.

The suffragettes were all about speaking up, screaming for their rights. You can't speak up for your right to be silent.

The room does not smell like apple. It smells like frog juice, a cross between a nursing home and potato salad. The Back Row pays attention. Cutting dead frogs is cool.

They were coming, on wings from far away, all the pictures and voices, smells, tastes, all the everything from the past was flying toward me as fast as it could.

The warped perception of time is a hallmark of trauma.

I am a citizen, with the same rights as your son, or you. As a citizen, as a student, I am protesting the tone of this lesson as racist, intolerant, and xenophobic.

I've got a cake rising," Eliza said. "I'm not leaving that for any man

If I could turn into a wisp of smoke, I could slip into them and disappear.

Dr. Parker and all my parents live in a paper-mache world. They just patch up problems with strips of newspaper and a little glue.

I have this halfway place, a rest stop on the road to sleep, where I can stay for hours. I don't even need to close my eyes, just stay safe under the covers and breathe.

Tell me this is a nightmare

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of strange little girls screaming through their fingers. My patient sisters, always waiting for me. I scroll through our confessions and rants and prayers, desperation eating us one slow bloody bite at a time.