Jesse Andrews · 295 pages
Rating: (102.8K votes)
“If after reading this book you come to my home and brutally murder me, I do not blame you.”
“When you convert a good book to a film. stupid things happen”
“One thing I've learned about people is that the easiest way to get them to like you is to shut up and let them do the talking.”
“It's like when a kitten tries to bite something to death. The kitten clearly has the cold-blooded murderous instinct of a predator, but at the same time, it's this cute little kitten, and all you want to do is stuff it in a shoebox and shoot a video of it for grandmas to watch on YouTube.”
“There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you, and then when it does, that's when you feel like shit.”
“Girls like good-looking guys, and I am not very good-looking. In fact, I sort of look like a pudding”
“The best ideas are always the simplest.”
“This book probably makes it seem like I hate myself and everything I do. But that's not totally true. I mostly just hate every person I've ever been. I'm actually fine with myself right now.”
“I entered Excessive Modesty Mode. Nothing is stupider and more ineffective than Excessive Modesty Mode. It is a mode in which you show that you’re modest by arguing with someone who is trying to compliment you. Essentially, you are going out of your way to try to convince someone that you’re a jerk.”
“The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet.”
“let’s face it: Most girls are annoying. I mean, most humans are annoying, so it’s not specific to girls. Also, I don’t really mean “annoying.” I guess I mean that most humans like to try to fuck up your plans.”
“Look, I was an idiot. I didn't want people to think that I had a crush, so I decided to give everyone the impression that I truly, honestly hated Madison Harter. For no reason. Just thinking about this makes me want to punch myself in the eyeball.”
“Usually it's when your guard is down that you find yourself saying the most dick sentences of your life.”
“We used to be pretty good friends, but fourteen-year-old girls are psychotic.”
“I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something.”
“Are you done eating that?"
"What?"
"You shouldn't finish that, Dad's gonna want some."
"The hell he will."
"He will."
"It's so nasty. Son, it's so nasty."
"Then why are you finishing it?"
"Taking a bullet.”
“And the point of Rachel the Film should really have been to express how awful and shitty that loss was, that she would have become a person with a long awesome life if she had been allowed to continue living, and that this was just a stupid meaningless loss, a motherfucking loss, a loss loss loss fucking loss, there was no fucking meaning to it, there was nothing that could come out of it...”
“There are two kinds of hot girls: Evil Hot Girls, and Hot Girls Who Are Also Sympathetic Good-Hearted People and Will Not Intentionally Destroy Your Life (HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL).”
“I'm not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that you're supposed to think are deep because they're in italics. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about sentences like this:
The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.
Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?”
“I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you, and then when it does, that's when you feel like shit.”
“But the hardest is watching your son watching his friend die.”
“Theory: People always get fired up when an unattractive girl an unattractive dude are dating each other.”
“So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks. Do you accept that premise? Of course you do. It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad?”
“I am the Thomas Edison of conversational stupidity.”
“I’m smart in some ways- pretty good vocabulary, solid at math – but I am definitely the stupidest smart person there is… I was going to be the worst friend in the history of dying girls… Because I don’t really have a moral compass and I need to rely on (Earl) for guidance, or else I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something. How fucked up is that.”
“this book probably makes it seem as if I hate myself and everything I do. I mostly just hate every person I've ever *been*
- Greg Gaines (CHARACTER), Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”
“And if a jock. God forbid, witnesses you hobnobbing with theater kids, he will immediately assume you are gay, and there is no force on earth greater than the fear jocks have homosexuals. None. It's like the Jewish fear of Nazis, except the complete opposite with regard to who is beating the crap out of whom. So I guess it's more like the Nazi fear of Jews.”
“When girls see two Unattractives dating, they think, 'Hey! Love is possible even for unattractive people. They have to love different things about each other than their physical appearances. That's so sweet.' Meanwhile, dudes see it and think, 'That is one less guy I have to compete with for the most succulent boobs in the Boob Competition that is high school.”
“If this were a video game, you could just break everything in this room and a bunch of money would come out of it, and you wouldn’t even have to pick it up, you would just walk into it and suddenly it would be in your bank account.”
“Mom was asking me to resume a friendship that had no honest foundation and ended on screamingly awkward terms. How do you do that? You can’t.”
“Looks like you suck at volleyball just as much as you do at making late night phone calls.”
“There is irony in the book of Job, due to the fact that God seems both too close and too far away. On the one hand, Job complains that God is watching him every moment so that he cannot even swallow his spit (7:19). On the other hand, Job finds God elusive, feeling that he cannot be found (9:11).”
“life has a way of poking holes in your plans, or in the plans others make for you”
“Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.”
“Real protection means teaching children to manage risks on their own, not shielding them from every hazard.”
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