Quotes from Robin Wasserman

I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

'The Waking Dark' is about what happens when something awakens a town's darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world.

Nor did I need anyone's pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I have been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the powere to accept anything and move on.

Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers.

Don't go looking in dark places, because dark things live there.

Chris loved you, I said, and the truth of it was almost a physical pain. She wouldn't look at me. No he didn't. And he would have figured it out eventually. So would you? Then where would I have been? Not here.

Life is a physics problem. Bodies in motion.

Under the best of circumstances, middle school is a sixth-circle-of-hell situation, sandwiched somewhere between flaming tombs and flesh-eating harpies. It's the kind of situation that doesn't need gasoline on the fire, especially when said gasoline comes in the form of your older brother murdering the older sister of the third-most popular girl in school.

Eli shouted my name, and then his arounds were around me, and I reached for Adriane who held fast to a blistering, burning creature that once had been Max and somehow still breathed and stood and howled. Though he was now nothing but flame, a golem of fire, that lived only because he'd forgotten how to die.

Stevens, who knew that mouth could do more thana rgue? You're a true blue friend, a red-hot lady and all that other good yearbook shit. You've got a big heart and I've got an even bigger...you know. So we're both winners. KG

The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness.

And you know what? If there is a God, and it's that same God who's so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can't get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some.

Eli: 'If a machine like that really existed, people would be willing to kill for it. Lots of people.' Nora: 'Yeah, and if hot vampires really existed, suicide would be a viable option for wrinkle prevention. Your point?

Sort of pregnant. Sort of dead. Sort of Jewish. These are impossibles.

The world was full of weapons, when you cared to look.

I told myself I deserved some good luck, overlooking the fact that it would call for substantially more than luck to thrust me into one of those narratives where plain-Jane new girl catches the eye of inexplicably single Prince Charming, because somehow the new school has revealed her wild, irresistible beauty, of which she was never before aware.

Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it's neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I'd only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities.

As last days go, mine sucked. The last day I would have chosen — the last day I deserved — would have involved more chocolate.

They were kids. Kids don't care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedliky . It's home. They didn't notice the tanks in the backyard, the blood in the streets.

No matter how terrifying, they need to decide that the only rules that matter are the ones they write themselves.

They would fade away-and I would be left alone to face the people at school,and the reporters,and Adriane,and all the places where Max had taken my hand or breathed in my ear or told me he loved me,and the emptiness that used to be Chris.

That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else's words in a voice that somehow was and wasn't your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but-as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it-words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefor I am.

Popularity gives you power only over people who care about being popular. Ostracism gives you power only over those who fear being ostracized.