Quotes from Ned Vizzini

Travel. Fly. Swim. Meet. Love. Dance. Win. Smile. Laugh. Hold. Walk. Skip. Jog. Run. Run home and enjoy. Enjoy. Take these verbs and enjoy them. They're yours, Craig. You deserve them because you chose them. You could have left them all behind but you chose to stay here. So now live for real. Live. Live. Live. Live.

It's just… a possibility, like it's a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness. It's not a very likely possibility.

They always said on TV you could do anything you wanted, but here I was trying to do something and it wasn't working. I would never be able to do it.

There's so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I'm not and other people - younger people - are.

Just be careful of forming close relationships, Craig. Focus on Yourself. Only then does healing take place.

There's a lot of yuppies in this place, and you have that look about you, you know—the yuppie look of people with money?" "Yeah." "People who don't care about other people.

Like in Animal Farm, which I read, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others?

Tiny places have all the drama and beauty necessary for a universe.

If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression—maybe that's what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch.

It's so much more angry in my head than it could ever be outside.

It's not a big thing, but I guess it's true- big things are often just small things that are noticed.

It's so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself.

I thought you were interesting. Why did you do what it said?" "I…" I can't think up a fake answer quickly enough. "I'm a straight guy, you know. So if a girl talks to me or whatever, I'll do exactly what she says." Wait, now: make it a compliment. "Especially if it's a pretty girl." I smile.

The mother I'm completely over but the daughter I love to death. The mother I'd like to love to death." "Heh." "Don't do me any favors; only laugh if it's funny." "It is!

A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work hard and smart because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything.

He asked the class how many of us were taking computer science, and everybody but me and this one girl who didn't speak English raised their hands.

Great, excellent," the guy had said. "You other people are out of a job! Heh heh. Learn comp sci.

I'll fail. At school. Right. No, it's not exactly school. It's what comes after school. At life

Life can't be cured, it can be managed.

They're sort of ancillary, friends. I mean, they're important - everybody knows that; the TV tells you so - but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another.

Time is a person-made concept." "Really? Where'd you hear that?" "I made it up." "I don't know if that's true. We all live within time. It rules us." "I use my time how I want, so I rule it.

No. There are only things that could have turned out differently. You don't have any shoulds or woulds in your life, see? You only have things that could have gone a different way. You never know what truly would have happened if you had done your shoulds and woulds. Your life might have turned out worse, isn't that possible?

Craig, where are you?" 'it's funny how people ask that as soon as they get you on the phone. I think it's a by-product of cell phones: people – girls and moms especially – want to nail you down in a physical space. The fact is that you could be anywhere on a cell phone and it shouldn't be important where you are. But it becomes the first thing people ask.

I shrug. I don't really need to explain this to Aaron. He's been demoted from most important friend to friend, and he's going to have to earn that, even. And you know what else? I don't owe people anything, and I don't have to talk to them any more than I feel I need to.