“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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“If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.”
― Gregg Olsen, quote from Envy
“Economics operates legitimately and usefully within a 'given' framework which lies altogether outside the economic calculus. We might say that economics does not stand on its own feet, or that it is a 'derived' body of thought - derived from meta- economics. If the economist fails to study meta-economics, or, even worse. If he remains unaware of the fact that there are boundaries to the applicability of the economic calculus, he is likely to fall into a similar kind of error to that of certain medieval theologians who tried to settle questions of physics by means of biblical quotations. Every science is beneficial within its proper limits but becomes evil and destructive as soon as it transgresses them. The”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, quote from Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
“Because I feel as if I've known you my entire life. I feel as if there are unfinished things between us.”
― Caroline Hanson, quote from Love Is Mortal
“If you're not scared when you are writing you're not working hard enough. You'll be afraid but you have to keep going.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from The Burgess Boys
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Say Cheese and Die!BookQuoters 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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