Maniac Magee

Nobody knows who said it first, but somebody must have: 'Kid's gotta be a maniac.

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

His smile was so wide he’d have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway

The blanket was there, but it was the boy's embrace that covered and warmed him.

It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.

Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.

When somebody says or does something you like. Amen.

Inside his house, a kid gets one name, but on the other side of the door, it’s whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.

For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.

But thats okay, because the history of a kid is one part fact, two parts legend, and three parts snowball. And if you want to know what it was like back when Maniac Magee roamed these part, well, just run you're hand under your movie seat and be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.

Maniac kept trying, but he still couldn’t see it, this color business. He didn’t figure he was white any more than the East Enders were black. He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white (except for his eyeballs, which weren’t any whiter than the eyeballs of the kids in the East End).

His nostrils flared, he was breathing like a picadored bull.

Maniac Magee was not born in a dump.

What's the matter?" said the old man. "Can't you make up your mind what kind you want?" The kid laughed. "I want them all." He threw his hands out. "I'm learning everything!" He opened one of the books. "Look...geometry...triangles...

Unfortunately, he chose to put Arnold down at the one spot in town as bad as Finsterwald’s backyard—namely, Finsterwald’s front steps. When Arnold came to and discovered this, he took off like a horsefly from a swatter. As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back. They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read. 6 About an hour later Mrs.

Maniac Magee was blind. Sort of. "Oh, he could see objects, all right. He could see a flying football or a John McNab fastball better than anybody... "When you think about it, it's amazing all the stuff he didn't see. "Such as, big kids don't like little kids showing them up... "Or a kid who's another color. "Mania kept trying, but he still couldn't see it, this color business. He didn't figure he was white any more than the East Enders were black. He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white... "Which was all a big relief to Maniac, finding out he wasn't really white, because the way he figured, white was about the most boring color of all." - Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee