Quotes from Meg Rosoff

Looking at him was like staring at a prism; you saw something different from every angle. The one definite was that you couldn't stop looking at him.

Each day, a new crisis, a new massacre, a new threat of extinction, disease, internecine conflict, meteorological catastrophe... Behold man. Violent, self-serving and ruthless when in power; exploited, miserable and diseased when not.

I hate you, I thought, I hate you with your bloody nature-boy airs and your bloody forced-march voyage of bloody discovery. I wondered then if Finn's personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the the right sort of mentality to fall in step with a self-centered hermit-boy crab murderer.

all I could think was in New York that kid would have been stuck in a straitjacket practically from birth and dangled over a tank full of Educational Consultants and Remedial Experts all snapping at his ankles for the next twenty years arguing about his Special Needs and getting paid plenty for it.

What annoys me most is that it takes no effort to be born beautiful, no hard work, no mental agility, no strength of character. Just dumb luck. And yet it's a universal currency, often mistaken for moral superiority.

Why did you bother creating me, he wanted to ask. Why bother giving me a brain and a realization of how miserable existence can be? Why did you invent creatures who die, and worse, who know they are going to die? What is the point of so unkind an act of creation?

There was something soothing about a wedding, a confirmation that Victorian social order hadn't completely broken down; that it was possible to find your soulmate and live happily ever after like in some cheesy romcom, unlikely though it seemed.

He created man in his own image, and gave him dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and the cattle and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Which anyone could see was one big fat recipe for disaster.

but I can't remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn't count in my book, which this is.

Dear, dear," Ivan said, eyebrow raised. "So this is what Kansas looks like.

and I smiled at her because I still liked her from yesterday.

the Please was more like a command than a request

and I thought Vivid? that's a pretty strange word to choose

and sometimes I looked back at him doing the same expression myself just to see what he'd say.

Wake Up! And there was his face right near mine and a burning cigarette in one hand and some kind of striped Turkish slippers on his feet, and he said Come on we're going fishing. and it felt much nicer than usual to be alive even if it meant a bunch of fish were going to have to die.

he knew the answers to questions you hadn't even got around to asking yet.

and Edmond blew smoke rings in the air and I closed my eyes and wished they were mine.

And the soft sound of his voice made me want to move closer to him so I did, a little