Quotes from James Howe

We all start out thinking that there is such a thing as perfection and that there's something wrong with us if we settle for less. First we won't eat the food with the brown spots. Then we hate ourselves because we have our own brown spots—pimples or ears that are too big or legs that are too skinny.

Sometimes kids just act impulsively, but it's because we have strong feelings, not because we're trying to make trouble. —Bobby Goodspeed

So does being cool mean you get to go around calling other people names?

Quoting Goethe :) "We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and for others.

Mom, you're not going to let him name him, are you? That's favoritism, and I'll be traumatized if you do.

It doesn't matter how many times I've been called a name, it still hurts - and it still always comes as such a surprise that I never know how to respond. Or maybe I do, but I'm afraid.

You can spit until you're dry, but you'll never make a lake

Why, if I were to believe what everyone says about me, I would think myself quite, quite ugly. But I don't believe everyone, you see...I believe you because you are my friend. You think I'm beautiful, and so I am. —The Old One

Impossible," he said "I am in love with my food source.

Who do you see when you think of you? Are you an outsider, Cool, distant, angry, swimming against the current, or are you in the flow? When they tell you, This is who you are, do you say yes or no? Who do you see when you look beyond the skin and the surface, when you drift to sleep, when you are the person no one else knows? Who are you on the inside? Don't answer these questions. Not yet. First, open your eyes, your mind, your heart. See.

Writing it down is the way I make it real, the way I find my way into what it is I feel. The words on paper or computer screen tell me more than what I knew before I wrote them, help me remember what I'm afraid I'll forget, let me keep what I don't want to lose, say to me: You were here.

Some days I want to put my head in the sand. There's too much pain out there, there's too much that scares me. But I wouldn't be able to breathe with my head in the sand, and I wouldn't be able to hear or see or smell. The world is a lovely place...despite the sadness it holds for each of us, despite the terrible things we do.

You don't have to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend to know love. Just open up your heart and let the world in. Your heart is bigger than you can imagine, and so is the world, and so, granddaughter, are you. —Addie's grandmother

They're really into it, laughing and teasing each other, and I am looking at Pam and thinking once again how she is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and that if we were back in the olden times she might have been made into a goddess because she is so beautiful. Sometimes I cannot stop my mind. It's scary.

And adventures, no matter how dark or disturbing to recall, are meant to be shared.

At this point, Chester started to bathe his tail, which is a cat's way of changing a subject he finds uncomfortable.

Joe: Oo, Brittany "Aren't I Fabulous?" Hobson? Addie: She's not that bad. Joe: Brittany "All the Boys Like Me, I'm so Popular I Could Die" Hobson. Addie: Joe!

Who do you see when you look at them? You know the ones I mean: the others, the olders, the youngers, the ones who are not you, not like you or your friends, who wear the labels you give them until they give them back, saying, I believe these belong to you.

What must it be like to move through your days always in step with a friend?

Maybe this is what it's like for all only children: To love the family that isn't almost as much as the one that is.

Kids who get called the worst names oftentimes find each other. That's how it was with us. Skeezie Tookis and Addie Carle and Joe Bunch and me. We call ourselves the Gang of Five, but there are only four of us. We do it to keep people on their toes. Make 'em wonder. Or maybe we do it because we figure that there's one more kid out there who's going to need a gang to be part of. A misfit,like us.

Horace and Morris and Dolores were friends—the greatest of friends, the truest of friends, the now-and-forever-I'm-yours sort of friends.

which is ridiculous even to imagine, since those trapeze acts all have names like The Flying Fedoras, and mine would be called The Flying Bunches, which sounds like a couple of guys throwing bananas at each other).

TEN MINUTES LATER, we were at the door of "Lake Expectations," the Monroes' cabin retreat, named after Mr. Monroe's favorite book.