Quotes from Robert Cormier

He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes, I do, I do. I think. Jerry suddenly understood the poster--the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.

He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.

Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.

Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.

A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.

People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.

And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.

They tell you to do your own thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.

He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.

It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it.

She discovered how distant pity was from hate, how very far it was from love.

It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.

There was nothing more beautiful in the world than the sight of a teacher getting upset.

Often he rose early in the morning, before anyone else, and poured himself liquid through the sunrise streets, and everything seemed beautiful, everything in its proper orbit, nothing impossible, the entire world attainable.

They murdered him.

Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?

It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.

You see Carter, people are two things: greedy and cruel. So we have a perfect set-up here. The greed part - a kid pays a buck for a chance to win a hundred. Plus fifty boxes of chocolates. The cruel part - watching two guys hitting each other, maybe hurting each other, while they're safe in the bleachers. That's why it works, Carter, because we're all bastards.

You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

I don't mean to be insolent. I'm truthful. I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. For instance, you have bad breath, Lieutenant. I can smell it from here. It must offend a lot of people. That's the truth. But how many people have told you that? Instead, they either lie or try to avoid your company.