This one kid with crooked teeth named Leonard called me a "teacher's pet" in the hallway after Bill's class, but I didn't mind because I think he missed the point somewhere.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 196
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 166
"Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight."
That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 142
I wish I could report that it's getting better, but unfortunately it isn't. It's hard, too, because we've started school again, and I can't go to the places where I used to go. And it can't be like it was. And I wasn't ready to say good-bye just yet. To tell you the truth, I've just been avoiding everything.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 139
I just wish that God or my parents or Sam or my sister or someone would just tell me what's wrong with me. Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away. And disappear. I know that's wrong because it's my responsibility, and I know that things get worse before they get better because that's what my psychiatrist says, but this is a worse that feels too big.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 137
After I read the poem that compares the woman's hands to flowers and rain, I put the book down and went to the window. I stared at my reflection and the trees behind it for a long time. Not thinking anything. Not feeling anything. Not hearing the record. For hours. Something really is wrong with me. And I don't know what it is.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 106
It was especially fun to think that people all over the world were having similar conversations in their equivalent of the Big Boy. I would have told the table that, but they were really having fun being cynical, and I didn't want to ruin it.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 103
He said I was "developing" at a rapid pace and gave me a different kind of book as "a reward." It's On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I'm now up to about ten cigarettes a day.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 93
I made Aunt Helen a promise to only cry about important things because I would hate to think that crying as much as I do would make crying for Aunt Helen less than it is.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 86
As I was walking up the stairs to my dad's old room, and I was looking at the old photographs, I started thinking that there was a time when these weren't memories. That someone actually took that photograph, and the people in the photograph had just eaten lunch or something.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 85
When I was very little, we had my mom's mom, who always had candy, and my dad's mom, who always had cookies. My mom told me that when I was little, I called them "Candy Grandma" and "Cookies Grandma." I also called pizza crust "pizza bones." I don't know why I'm telling you this.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 74
All those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn't.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 69
On that piece of white paper, Sam wrote, "Write about me sometime." And I typed something back to her, standing right there in her bedroom. I just typed. "I will." And I felt good that those were the first two words that I ever typed on my new old typewriter that Sam gave me.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 67
I think it was the first time in my life I ever felt like I looked "good." Do you know what I mean? That nice feeling when you look in the mirror, and your hair's right for the first time in your life? I don't think we should base so much on weight, muscles, and a good hair day, but when it happens, it's nice. It really is.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 66
Sam and Patrick looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that's all you can ever ask from a friend.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 66
When I was done reading the poem, everyone was quiet. A very sad quiet. But the amazing thing was that it wasn't a bad sad at all. It was just something that made everyone look around at each other and know that they were there.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 64
I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 62
I thought about how many people have loved those songs. And how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs. And how many people enjoyed good times with those songs. And how much those songs really mean.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 53
I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 38
I didn't know that other people thought things about me. I didn't know that they looked.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 37
I have to say that it was the best milkshake I ever had in my life. It was so delicious, it almost scared me.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 33
Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spend, and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're driving to your first real party, and you're sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 26
Then, I turned around and walked to my room and closed my door and put my head under my pillow and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Pg 23
I look at people holding hands in the hallways, and I try to think about how it works. At the school dances, I sit in the background, and I tap my toe, and I wonder how many couples will dance to "their song." In the hallways, I see the girls wearing the guys' jackets, and I think about the idea of property. And I wonder if anyone is really happy. I hope they are. I really hope they are.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Looking For Alaska - Pg 214
I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 151
More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 144
That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 110
"Kevin is a blowup doll," Alaska said. "Prick us, we bleed. Prick him, he pops."
Looking For Alaska - Pg 103
The five of us walking confidently in a row, I'd never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 100
People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 93
I sat in the back of the hatchback on the drive home--and that is how I thought of it: home--and fell asleep to the highway's monotonous lullaby.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 88
"Shhhh," she said. "I'm sleeping." Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 81
After a while, she put down the book, and I felt warm but not drunk with the bottle resting between us--my chest touching the bottle and her chest touching the bottle but us not touching each other.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Looking For Alaska - Pg 81
She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 80
"So why don't you go home for vacations?" I asked her. "I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them."
Looking For Alaska - Pg 75
Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching -- a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness of the moment, I cared at least enough.
Looking For Alaska - Pg 54
She didn't even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, "You never get me. That's the whole point."
Looking For Alaska - Pg 53
"Well, later, I found out what it means. It's from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means 'that which the sea breaks against,' and I love that. But at the time, I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be. And it was damn far away from Vine Station, Alabama, just like I wanted to be."
Looking For Alaska - Pg 19
"That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape -- the world or the end of it?"
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Along The Watchtower - Pg 295
For a minute she saw each stone as a story, as if the cemetery were a big library full of books nobody else knew how to read, and nobody else wanted to.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 266
Van Zandt knew about some kind of traveling, but not her kind. Sounded like he was traveling on purpose to get some character, not because he had to. Van Zandt had traveling shoes. Lucinda had traveling feet.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 254
She could feel her father's alertness, his tension. He had never been receptive like that, but she could feel his need today, the hole in him howling to be filled. She had the same hole. She also had his bony knees, blue eyes, and tremendous powers of concentration, but this hole was their most striking similarity.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 197
"I believe in everything," he said in an exhausted voice, as if the effort of so much believing had cost him.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 187
She imagined Nately smiling over the noise, his Adam's apple sticking out above the crowd, his fuzz of red hair bleached in the spotlights. Lucinda saw him smiling as he listened to the music and found something at its center, something outside language, tumbling into violence, as the song went off the rails and the lead singer of the Sub Plots screamed like a dying bird. The white-hot center -- Nately was there.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 187
Every system had its uniform, and here was the punk uniform all around her, as regimented as a roomful of GIs in battle-dress uniform, and proof that what may have started as pure emotion had hardened into just another codified set of rules for representing abstractions. The music was real, though.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 182
Compared to Toxic's incoherent cultural compost, her dad's attitudes seemed cozy, his self-absorption the devil that she knew. The devil that she didn't know smelled like gummi bears and was a thousand times scarier, his allegiances too contradictory for her to predict what he meant or what he'd do.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 179
The more she drank, the more she dais, "Stars fell!" whenever Jim Morrison sang, "Oh moon of Alabama." No one had asked what she meant.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 161
Her dad told her about listening to the AFN during a firefight one night in Vietnam and how everybody's bloodlust let up when the Beatles came on. "Made me want to lay down in a park and drink some goddamned tea."
Along The Watchtower - Pg 136
"They're not American, huh?" Lucinda cocked her head and looked at him. "No. How can you tell?" "Just can. Can't you?" "Yeah. There's something about it, a mood or something we just don't use much. Like the name Nigel."
Along The Watchtower - Pg 123
"How's your dad?" she asked. "Mom says he's okay," Liz said. "They've got him doped up. I get to see him tomorrow. His ear is goners." "Like van Gogh," Lucinda said. "Van Gogh cut his off. He was a great artist." "My dad's not a great artist." "Maybe," Lucinda said. "Maybe he will be. He's still alive -- he could be anything."
Along The Watchtower - Pg 123
She revised her assumptions now, saw that he was haunting because he was haunted -- by something he'd done, maybe many things, horrible things he couldn't abide and to which he had been unable or unwilling to say no.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 123
She thought of the still, straight profile of her Nazi ghost, who almost seemed to float beside her now. He was hers because she saw him, hers because she let her mind reach inside him and imagine what he saw.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 121
"Compared to this, what happened to my dad was like a bad day or something. A little mistake." Lucinda thought of Liz three nights earlier, pinned by Faye to the stairs and screaming. A little mistake.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 42
Lucinda had had a craving, for as long as she could remember, for some sort of framework for talking about things unseen. Anymore she found rock and roll starting to fill that spot, music and lyrics like spirit and word, but earlier, she had thought religion might have a vocabulary to help her put voice to her questions and longings.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 41
Recalling how they met was a cooldown tactic she had seen him use before and it usually worked, her mother slipping into a skin she seldom wore, a flower child, a hitchhiker staring into a limitless horizon. Watching her slide into that self was like watching cake rise from batter in the oven. She became, if only for a few moments, what she was probably supposed to be.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 33
Lucinda grabbed one, hot pink with orange hair, and slipped him into the front pocket of her shorts. She didn't know why. She didn't even like the troll. But her father said life was for the taking, and only the strong ever realize it. Lucinda realized it.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 30
If he was wrong, if everything really wasn't okay, Lucinda didn't know how her family could survive the hour. But he sounded so sure. And he was her dad.
Along The Watchtower - Pg 22
Lucinda twisted toward Syd and raised her foor. "My lucky shoes," she explained. They were more than that, though. They were talismanic, emblematic: they said the magic word.
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