Quotes from Gary D. Schmidt

In the midst of great anxiety and great sadness, it takes an honorable man to nourish the goodness around him, small and fragile as it may seem.

My brother looked at me. I looked at him. Sometimes- and I know it doesn't last for anything more than a second- sometimes there can be perfect understanding between two people who can't stand each other. He smiled, and I smiled, and we put on the Timex watches on, and we watched the seconds flit by. It was the first watch my brother had ever owned. It was the first watch I had ever owned.

you can't believe how hard it is to make a puffin not look like a chump

The warm breezes are coming in the window like quiet happiness.

She sort of reminded me of Lil—which I did not tell her—and which you shouldn't tell her I said either

Even Doug Swieteck's brother couldn't cuss like that -- and he could cuss the yellow off a school bus.

Doug Swieteck's brother wouldn't even come near me, and I would foil Mrs. Baker's nefarious plan. But

stomachs aren't supposed

Teachers don't reckon time the way normal people do.

past the back of a bunch of stores and an old bar that looked like no one who went in there went in happy.

Mr Powell raised an eyebrow. 'I'm a librarian' he said. 'I always know what I'm talking about.

The world turns and the world spins, the tide runs in and the tide runs out, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful and more wonderful in all its evolved forms than two souls who look at each other straight on. And there is nothing more woeful and soul-saddening than when they are parted. Turner knew that everything in the world rejoices in the touch, and everything in the world laments in the losing.

I have a message for you but I don't think you'll understand it." Danny's father said. "What is it?" "Danny said, "beat the pied ninnies.

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

sometimes it feels as if life is governed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Would you have left a guy being beat up to go find a teacher?' I asked. My father, he wiped his hand across his face, and what was left behind was a smile. Really, a smile. 'Not in a million years,' he said.

Turner was pushed farther and farther back, wondering why they didn't see that Mrs. Cobb would have hated all the fuss, that they were shoving furniture from where it was supposed to be, that they had bunched up the runner in the front hall. Maybe this was what death was - when no one cared about one dang thing you had cared about.

Someday, people will be buying these in antique shops, and they'll have tiny computers that they carry around with them"—which I think he probably meant as a joke, except he didn't laugh.

W)hen we laugh, we escape the Devil.

And Meryl Lee thought, I wonder how this happens. You live side by side for a while, and suddenly you realize you like living side by side, and you can't imagine not living side by side because you've become friends. And then your friends become friends with one another, and they sit beside one another and cry. How does that happen? But isn't it good that it does?

Thanks," I said. "Go home," he said.

What would you have me say, Mr. Stonecrop? That my own boy shouldn't find shelter for someone in need? That my own boy shouldn't care for the outcast?" Now he leaned across the desk. "By God, that my own boy shouldn't stand up—as his father should have stood up—against the money of the town when it set about to destroy a community that never harmed it, merely for the sake of tourists from Boston? Is that what you'd have me say to

During the day, the air glistened with hovering ice. At night, the stars were razor sharp. At dawn, the sunlight went straight up in a hazy column. And sunset closed the day with a quick wink. No kidding. One minute it was bright daylight, and then you turned your back and it was full dark, like it was trying to catch you.

DOWNED HELICOPTER TRANSPORT STOP KHESANH STOP LT T BAKER MISSING IN ACTION STOP