Quotes from Ned Vizzini

I like you a lot. Because you're funny and smart and because you seem to like me. I know that's not a good reason, but I can't help it; if a girl likes me I tend to like her back [...] I like you for all this stuff but I also kind of like you for the cuts on your face—

I'm going to be here until I'm cured? Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner. Life is managed.

The Shift hasn't happened yet, maybe it never will, but sometimes-just enough times to give me hope-my brain jars back into where it's supposed to be.

I think you run out of 'I love yous

I want my brain to slide back into the slot it was meant to be in, rest there the way it did before the fall of last year, back when I was young, witty, and my teachers said I had incredible promise.

Do you have difficulty sleeping?" "Sometimes not. When I do it's bad, though. I lie there thinking about how everything I've done is a failure, death and failure, and there's no hope for me except being homeless, because I'm never going to be able to hold a job because everyone else is so much smarter.

Misfortune is no excuse for cruelty.

Nobody had told me I was common.

never touching, never talking, just smiling and keeping our eyes locked.

That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy.

But I find God to be an ineffectual shrink. He adopts the "do nothing" method of therapy. You tell him your problems and he, ah, does nothing.

Sometimes I just think depression's one way of coping with the world. Like, some people get drunk, some people do drugs, some people get depressed.

And I'm not assuming and I'm not judging. I'm just being curious.

Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner. Dr. Mahmoud leans in. Life is managed.

I'm glad you came here and got the help you needed, Neil says, and he shakes my hand in that way that people do in here to remind themselves that you're the patient and they're the doctor/volunteer/ employee. They like you, and they genuinely want you to do better, but when they shake your hand you feel that distance, that slight disconnect because they know that you're still broken somewhere, that you might snap at any moment.

They're sort of ancillary anyway, 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.

I'll fail. At schoool.Failing at school is failing at life.

I know a lot of famous people didn't do well at school, like James Brown; he dropped out in fifth grade to be an entertainer, I respect that... but that's not going to be me. I'm not going to be able to do anything but work as hard as possible all the time and compete with everyone I know all the time to make it.

I eat not because I want to, not because I have to overcome anything, not to prove myself to anyone, but because it's there. I eat because that's what people do. And somehow when the food is put in front of you by an institution, when there's a large gray force behind it and you don't have to thank anyone for it, you have the animal instinct to make it disappear

Doc, I'm not afraid of dying; I'm only afraid of living, and I want to put this bayonet through my stomach

Where are you supposed to put your arms when you dance? It's like the Universal Question. I guess you're supposed to put them around someone.

Time is a person-made concept.

But some people have to get lucky just to live. And I never knew I could make anybody lucky.

Dad nods, looks me dead in the eyes; slowly and regretfully, he banishes all the smiling and joking from his face, and for once he's just my dad, watching his son who has fallen so low.