Quotes from Laurie Halse Anderson

When life sucks, read. They can't yell at you for that. And if they do, then you can ignore them.

I reach for funny books all the time to help me get through life.

I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at.

She looks like a china doll, observed Grandfather as we departed. I will break just as easily, I muttered.

Didn't help to ponder things that were forever gone. It only made a body restless and fill up with bees, all wanting to sting something.

Life is for the living. Don't let the fear of striking out let you from keep you from playing the game.

It was like looking at a knot, knowing it was a knot, but not knowing how to untie it. I had no map for this life.

Each reader has to find her or his own message within a book.

This is my one beef with Hollywood: It's great for movie sales, but they've created this fiction for us that, when you have a hard thing in your life, it's going to get fixed, and then your life will be awesome! Forever!

I think how veterans are treated in our country is an abomination. We don't have the draft any more, which is why so many soldiers come from working-class - rather than middle- or high-income families. Those wealthier families aren't affected, so they're not agitating for change.

It's bad timing, but a lot of kids become teenagers just as their parents are hitting their mid-life crisis. So everybody's miserable and confused and seeking that new sense of identity.

They tied me back together, but they didn't use double knots. My insides are draining out of the fault lines in my skin, I can feel it, but every time I check the bandages, they're dry.

The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up.

Sometimes when I find myself very irritated about a topic, I know it's my next book.

The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.

Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.

I've written in every imaginable location; a repurposed closet, the kitchen table, the bleachers while my kids had basketball practice, the front seat of the car when they were at soccer. In airports. On trains. In the break room when I was supposed to be wolfing down dinner. In the back of classrooms when I was supposed to be paying attention.

Picasso." He whispers like a priest. "Picasso. Who saw the truth. Who painted the truth, molded it, ripped from the earth with two angry hands.

I'm a big 'Star Trek' fan.

I needed to hear the world but didn't want the world to know I was listening.

The one good thing about being kind of shy is that nobody bugs you when you want to be left alone.

Kids are mostly very resilient.