Laurie Halse Anderson, The Impossible Knife of Memory
26 quotes
"Killing people is easier than it should be.” Dad put on his beret. “Staying alive is harder."
"Could he hear my heart pounding?"
"The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever."
"I am an owl, bird of the night. I see everything. I know everything."
"Until then we're going to keep making memories like this, moments when we're the only two people in the whole world. And when we get scared or lonely or confused, we'll pull out these memories and wrap them around us and they'll make us feel safe. And strong."
"I had let down my shields, that was the problem. The crazy inside Dad had infected me, weakened me so that when Finn smiled, I'd been vulnerable. I'd dropped my shields and let myself pretend that somebody like Finn would want to be with somebody like me."
"My only choice was to fight my way out, even if I didn't think I would make it."
"It was hard to know how to play the game when the rules kept changing."
"The gloaming that closed over us the cemetery had crawled inside his skin."
"Having a friend made everything else suck less."
"Tell me this is a nightmare"
"It doesn't matter where I go, I don't want to be there. And then I get to the next place, and I don't want to be there either."
"The smoke shifted direction and I breathed in. Breathed out. On the inhale I was angry. On the exhale…there it was again. Fear. The fear made me angry and the anger made me afraid and I wasn’t sure who he was anymore. Or who I was."
"I could never hate you, even if I wanted to."
"Everyone is born a freak," notes Hayley. "Every newborn baby, wet and hungry and screaming, is a fresh-hatched freak who wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. . . . Most teenagers wind up in high school. And high school is where the zombification process becomes deadly."
"I kissed him until everything that hurt inside me melted into a pool of black water so deep I couldn’t touch the bottom. As long as I was touching him, I wouldn’t drown."
"Yes it is, because you can only be brave if you're scared."
"Why do you have such a crappy attitude about math?""I don't. I have a crappy attitude about everything."
"I’d given him bits and pieces of my peculiar life, but colored softer and funnier than they had been. I’d painted my dad as Don Quixote in a semi, on a quest for philosophical truths and the best cup of coffee in the nation."
"The trick to surviving an interrogation is patience. Don’t offer up anything. Don’t explain. Answer the question and only the question that is asked so you don’t accidentally put your head in a noose."
"The night sky stretched on forever above me, the stars flung like glass beads and pearls on a black velvet cloak."
"Where did you live before you came here?" I asked. "The moon," he said smoothly. "We left because the place had no atmosphere."
"That's such bullshit, Mythology repeated by parents because it lets them force their kids into sports and push them too hard by pretending that in the end it will pay off with the holy scholarship. You know how many kids get a free ride? Hardly any. Like, maybe fourteen.' -Finn (165)"
"Gracie's father was an engineer, her mother an accountant. I couldn't picture either one of them yelling or throwing things or having affairs. I could see my dad doing stuff like that. Trish sure did. But Dad carried a war in his skull, and Trish was a drunk. Gracie's parents didn't have anything like that to deal with, but their daughter was falling apart on the bathroom floor."
"You're the one who doesn't understand, I've been standing on the edge with you for years."