Quotes from Anatomy of a Misfit

Andrea Portes ·  336 pages

Rating: (8.8K votes)


“It's one of those dumb days where nothing's really wrong but nothing's really right either and the sky can't even choose to be white or gray.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“Ceaseless.
Almost too much for this small frame.
You make me part of the sky.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“I look like vanilla pudding so nobody knows that on the inside I am spider soup.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“But if I can keep my mind on these pages I don't have to care. I can make this all just go away. Poof. I can stay in this book and then this book gets to be real and everything else gets to be fake and who cares anyway.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“You could waste your whole life worrying, you know that?”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit



“I don't know how to act around anybody.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“We tried to be all of the things ... we are not.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“I mean if there was any justice in the world you wouldn't even have to go to school during your period. You'd just stay home for five days and eat chocolate and cry.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“You get one chance.

You get to do this and that and you don't even know when it goes from swirling forward and around and around in circles to just a plain cold stop and nothing more. Can you believe it? All this time I've spent weighing this and weighing that, worrying about this and worrying about that, living back then and living forward, caring about so-and-so, too, but never living here, here, this moment here. Never even acknowledging that this moment even exists, and it hits me like a live volt through the chest.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“Just so you know. I fucking loved you. I fucking loved the daylights out of you.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit



“We're both whisper-screaming at each other. All I can think is this is the worst possible way to break up with somebody.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“Okay, listen, I don't know what dumb lines you are used to giving girls so they fall all over you but I just want you to know that I wasn't born yesterday so I am gonna go now and leave you to whatever dumb idiot girl is gonna buy that line.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“We tried to be less self-involved. We tried to look up from our dumb obsessions and notice other people. We tried to be open, for once. We tried not to be just another vaguely racist family. We tried to be enlightened. We tried to be good.
We tried to be all of the things . . . we are not.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“Let's just call it like it is, no need to pretty it up. I care what other people think of me. I'm not Jesus Christ. I'm just a girl in the world.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“You get one chance.
You get to do this thing one time and you don’t even know when it goes from swirling forward and around and around in circles to just a plain cold stop and nothing more. Can you believe it? All this time I’ve spent weighing this and weighing that, worrying about this and worrying about that, living back then and living forward, caring about what so-and-so thinks and about so-and-so, too, but never living here, here, this moment here. Never even acknowledging that this moment even exists, and it hits me, like a live volt through the chest.
This moment here.
This is all you get.
Before you are part of the sky”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit



“I know a lot of people think that whole God thing is a joke but I just get a feeling he's up there somewhere.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“This moment here.
This is all you get.
Before you are part of the sky.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“I bet she thought she was getting into a fight with a vanilla wafer on roller skates but little did she know she was getting into a fight with a spider sandwich.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“I mean, if there was any justice in the world you wouldn’t even have to go to school during your period.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“Logan is a sideways, brilliant, honest guy who does the coolest stuff ever, and everybody hates, but who I am basically in love with.
But Logan is damaged, broken. And, let’s not sugarcoat it, that ain’t gonna change.
Even though it isn’t his fault, even though his shitty father caused it, even though it’s not fair . . . that kinda thing cuts deep. That kinda thing sticks”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit



“I mean it's like trying to decide between James Dean and Elvis. Seriously, who could make that choice?”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“You look cute in your little uniform." [Jared]

Did he read my mind or something?

"Yeah? You don't think I look like an Easter egg?"

"No. I think you look like I should be asking you to marry me."

CRASH!”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“I can't help but wonder...if it's such a big deal for a middle-aged white guy to feel important...What happens when he doesn't?”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“I'd like a cheese Bunza. French fries. A Dr Pepper --"

"Oh, you're a Pepper?"

"Yeah, I'm a Pepper. Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?"

I can't help but laugh at this guy. He's actually funny. Kind of a surprise. I thought maybe he'd just be some hot lug-head jerk. But this? This is unfair.

"And a shake."

"Really?"

"Yeah. A shake. Instead of Dr Pepper. Oh ... and you. I'd like a date with you. Saturday night.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“Never judge a man until you walk a mile in his shoes. That way, you're a mile away and you've got his shoes.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit



“I know they say that’s the way the cookie crumbles and all. But you can’t help but wonder why there’s any cookie-crumbling going on in the first place.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“To be honest, she may be kind of scared of the register. Or maybe she can’t add. She is a Christian. I don’t think they believe in math.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“It doesn’t say: “Logan’s kid brothers looked like little angels in Star Wars pajamas and that fucking fuckface tried to shoot them dead, and what’s the point in God, or anything in the universe after that?”
It doesn’t say: “God. Where the fuck were you last night?”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“I cared what everybody thought more than what I thought. Or more than my heart thought. And that makes me an idiot.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit


“If you turned a Labrador into a person you would make Brad Kline. He's happy and gushy and about as interesting and complex as a tree stump.”
― Andrea Portes, quote from Anatomy of a Misfit



About the author

Andrea Portes
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Popular quotes

“There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.”
― Aminatta Forna, quote from The Hired Man


“I don't know what I was hoping for. Some small praise, I guess. A bit of encouragement. I didn't get it. Miss Parrish took me aside one day after school let out. She said she'd read my stories and found them morbid and dispiriting. She said literature was meant to uplift the heart and that a young woman such as myself ought to turn her mind to topics more cheerful and inspiring than lonely hermits and dead children.

"Look around yourself, Mathilda," she said. "At the magnificence of nature. It should inspire joy and awe. Reverence. Respect. Beautiful thoughts and fine words."

I had looked around. I'd seen all the things she'd spoken of and more besides. I'd seen a bear cub lift it's face to the drenching spring rains. And the sliver moon of winter, so high and blinding. I'd seen the crimson glory of a stand of sugar maples in autumn and the unspeakable stillness of a mountain lake at dawn. I'd seen them and loved them. But I'd also seen the dark of things. The starved carcasses of winter deer. The driving fury of a blizzard wind. And the gloom that broods under the pines always. Even on the brightest days.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, quote from A Gathering Light


“The root destruction of religion in the country, which throughout the twenties and thirties was one of the most important goals of the GPU-NKVD, could be realized only by mass arrests of Orthodox believers. Monks and nuns, whose black habits had been a distinctive feature of Old Russian life, were intensively rounded up on every hand, placed under arrest, and sent into exile. They arrested and sentenced active laymen. The circles kept getting bigger, as they raked in ordinary believers as well, old people and particularly women, who were the most stubborn believers of all and who, for many long years to come, would be called 'nuns' in transit prisons and in camps.

True, they were supposedly being arrested and tried not for their actual faith but for openly declaring their convictions and for bringing up their children in the same spirit. As Tanya Khodkevich wrote:

You can pray freely
But just so God alone can hear.

(She received a ten-year sentence for these verses.) A person convinced that he possessed spiritual truth was required to conceal it from his own children! In the twenties the religious education of children was classified as a political crime under Article 58-10 of the Code--in other words, counterrevolutionary propaganda! True, one was permitted to renounce one's religion at one's trial: it didn't often happen but it nonetheless did happen that the father would renounce his religion and remain at home to raise the children while the mother went to the Solovetsky Islands. (Throughout all those years women manifested great firmness in their faith.) All persons convicted of religious activity received 'tenners,' the longest term then given.

(In those years, particularly in 1927, in purging the big cities for the pure society that was coming into being, they sent prostitutes to the Solovetsky Islands along with the 'nuns.' Those lovers of a sinful earthly life were given three-year sentences under a more lenient article of the Code. The conditions in prisoner transports, in transit prisons, and on the Solovetsky Islands were not of a sort to hinder them from plying their merry trade among the administrators and the convoy guards. And three years later they would return with laden suitcases to the places they had come from. Religious prisoners, however, were prohibited from ever returning to their children and their home areas.)”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1


“Robin didn't like that idea very much-Jules spending time with Adam? "I get jealousy too, you know. You used to be in love with him."

Jules turned his head to look at him. "That was before I knew what love really was". He smiled. "When I met you, Robin, God.... I had to redefine everything. You know, there was this country song my mother really liked. It used to annoy me, I was in my technopop phase, but lately I just... I find myself thinking about the lyrics all the time. That was a river, this is the ocean.... I thought I loved Adam, and I did, but... it wasn't even close to this incredible ocean that I feel for you".”
― Suzanne Brockmann, quote from All Through the Night


“Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness.”
― Marquis de Sade, quote from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings


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