“All good books are about everything, abbreviated.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Stupid people should never read books.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Do you think I'm queer, Rob?" I asked.
"I don't care if you're queer," Robby said. "Queer is just a word. Like orange. I know who you are. There's no one word for that.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to decide not to decide, to remain confused and wide-eyed about the next thing that will pop up in the road you build.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“History provides a compelling argument that every scientist who tinkers around with unstoppable shit needs a reliable flamethrower.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Coffee is a girl who never tells a boy no.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“We made this stupid rule and this stupid rule.
Boys are not allowed to love each other.
Then we painted a bison on the wall.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“You must be crazy, after all, if a bird loves you.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“We killed this big hairy thing and that big hairy thing. And that was our day. You know what I mean.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“History does show that boys who dance are far more likely to pass along their genes than boys who don't.
Boys who dance are genetic volcanoes.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Well, if I'm going to get beat up for being queer, at least I'd like to know one time what it feels like to be kissed."
"Um. I guess you deserve that. You know. Everyone deserves to not feel alone.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Here is what the end of the world looks like:
It looks like a child running out into the road, eyes focused only on some destination ahead - the future, which is on the other side - and the child fails to notice the speeding truck that is there, on that same road, in the present.
This is what the end of the world looks like.
All roads cross here.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Everyone on every road that crossed beneath the point of my pen was always going to do the same things over and over and over.
I was confused.
How could I be in love with a girl and a boy, at the same time?
I was trapped forever.
You know what I mean.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“History does show that nothing means a hell of a lot more than nothing when teenagers talk. In this case, Robby knew it meant that I did not want to talk about it, so he left me alone.
Robby Brees was such a good friend.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“I was going to do something I'd never done, and see things I could not understand and never believed existed.
This is history, and it is also the truth.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric.
The music sounded better than anything I'd ever heard.
I had never been so happy in my life.
I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest.
I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“They were both so beautiful, and their sound, as we said them to each other above the music, made our chests fill up with something electric and buzzing, like love and magic.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“You know, if they ever gave a Nobel Prize for avoiding work, every year some white guy in Iowa would get a million bucks and a trip to Sweden.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“You could never get everything in a book. Good books are always about everything.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“There is something inside all boys that drives us to go away again and again and again.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“History chews up sexually uncertain boys, and spits us out as recycled, generic greeting cards for lonely old men.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“History shows that an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man’s library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“To me, hearing that those girls gave my brother Eric a blow job sounded very nice.
History shows that all boys consider blow job to be a nice-sounding set of words.
I thought a blow job was putting your face in front of an air conditioner, which is something all nine-year-old boys love to do, even though Eric did not look like he had been cooled off very much.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“All roads lead past shooting ranges, liquor stores, and gay bars. Wanderlust is part of the American Spirit.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“History is full of decapitations, and Iowa is no exception.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“History shows that erections happen at the worst possible times, and they stick around until someone else notices them. Often, it is either a librarian or an English teacher, like Mrs. Edith Mitchell.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Robby called me Porcupine because of how I wore my hair. I didn't mind. Everyone else called me Austin.
Austin Szerba.
It is Polish.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“Hungry Jack’s real name was Charles R. Hoofard.
He was born in Indianapolis in 1950.
In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.
Harry Truman, as far as I can tell, also never took a shit in his life.
In 1950, the same year that a boy named Charles R. Hoofard was born in Indianapolis, President Harry S. Truman sent military assistance to the French. They were trying to maintain their French Catholic colony in Vietnam. That military aid would grow and blossom to the point that a boy with wanderlust from Indiana named Charles R. Hoofard ultimately took time out from fucking whatever he wanted to fuck to participate in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children.
History is full of shit like that.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
“I do not know why, because that is not my job, but history shows that every time a teenage boy opens a permanent marker, he will first sniff it before deciding how to go about defacing the planet.”
― Andrew Smith, quote from Grasshopper Jungle
Andrew Smith
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“We spread the Gospel by the proclamation of the Word of God (see Rom. 10:17). But God has told us that we should restrain evil by the power of the sword and by the power of civil government (as in the teaching of Romans 13:1–6, quoted above, p. 37). If the power of government (such as a policeman) is not present in an emergency, when great harm is being done to another person, then my love for the victim should lead me to use physical force to prevent any further harm from occurring. If I found a criminal attacking my wife or children, I would use all my physical strength and all the physical force at my disposal against him, not to persuade him to trust in Christ as his Savior, but to immediately stop him from harming my wife and children! I would follow the command of Nehemiah, who told the men of Israel, “Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes” (Neh. 4:14; see also Genesis 14:14–16, where Abraham rescued his kinsman Lot who had been taken captive by a raiding army). Boyd has wrongly taken one of the ways that God restrains evil in this world (changing hearts through the Gospel of Christ) and decided that it is the only way that God restrains evil (thus neglecting the valuable role of civil government). Both means are from God, both are good, and both should be used by Christians.”
― Wayne A. Grudem, quote from Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture
“There is one final bad-news punch line to my life. This bad news is complicated, difficult to explain. In a nutshell, it’s that I am pretty sure that my dad is planning to kill me. The good news is that he’d be doing this out of his love for me. The bad news is that whatever the wonderfulness of his motives, I’ll be dead.”
― Terry Trueman, quote from Stuck in Neutral
“You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”
― Max Ehrmann, quote from Desiderata: Words For Life
“Hiçbir kral, hiçbir imparator, hiçbir hükümdar devletini yitirdiği için Boranlı Yedigey kadar umutsuzluğa düşmemiş, onun kadar acı duymamış ve ağlamamıştı.”
― Chingiz Aitmatov, quote from The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years
“I also read that spending time with a pedophile can be like a drug high. There was this girl who said it’s as if the pedophile lives in a fantastic kind of reality, and that fantasticness infects everything. Kind of like they’re children themselves, only full of the knowledge that children don’t have. Their imaginations are stronger than kids’ and they can build realities that small kids would never be able to dream up. They can make the child’s world… ecstatic somehow. And when it’s over, for people who’ve been through this, it’s like coming off of heroin and, for years, they can’t stop chasing the ghost of how it felt. One girl said that it’s like the earth is scorched and the grass won’t grow back. And the ground looks black and barren but inside it’s still burning.”
― Margaux Fragoso, quote from Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir
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If I Was Your GirlBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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