Quotes from Laurie Halse Anderson

I stuff my mouth with old fabric and scream until there are no sounds left under my skin.

Grandma frowned and yelled something in Russian. She could have been saying, 'Open up, your best friend is here.' On the other hand, it could have been, 'America is a great country because of canned ravioli.

I keep thinking that if I could just unzip my skin, step out of this body, then I would see who I really am.

I understood what triggered her earthquakes, most of them.

be aggressive, BE-BE Aggressive! B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E

Yes it is, because you can only be brave if you're scared.

I want to eat like a normal person eats, but I need to see my bones or I will hate myself even more and I might cut out my heart or take every pill that was ever made.

I don't know what I'm doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I'll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I'll think about a career path.

I stand in the center aisle of the auditorium, a wounded zebra in a National Geographic special, looking for someone, anyone to sit next to. A predator approaches: gray jock buzz cut, whistle around a neck thicker than his head. Probably a social studies teacher, hired to coach a blood sport.

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

Everyone is born a freak, notes Hayley. Every newborn baby, wet and hungry and screaming, is a fresh-hatched freak who wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. . . . Most teenagers wind up in high school. And high school is where the zombification process becomes deadly.

I am a gluttonous, gorging failure. A waste. My body isn't used to high-sugar carbs laced with witchcraft. It can barely cope with soup and crackers.

Eve ate the apple because Adam was afraid

Until then we're going to keep making memories like this, moments when we're the only two people in the whole world. And when we get scared or lonely or confused, we'll pull out these memories and wrap them around us and they'll make us feel safe. And strong.

They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American.

Apologies mean nothing if you don't mean it.

Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn't even know were under the ground. Pieces of dad, too.

Hannah was about to burst with excitement, which would have been disgusting because she would have sprayed blood, guts and glitter in every direction.

The trick to surviving an interrogation is patience. Don't offer up anything. Don't explain. Answer the question and only the question that is asked so you don't accidentally put your head in a noose.

the only thing that helped me breathe was opening a book

There is nothing wrong with me. These are really sick people, sick that you can see.

How did I get like this?

I want to tell him that it's just a stupid car, but bits of me are scattered all over town; the graveyard, school, Cassie's room, the motel, and standing in from of the sink in my mother's kitchen. It takes too much energy to gather all the bits together, so I just sit there and watch him implode.

The laws of the universe dictate that for every positive action, there is an unequal and sucky reaction.