Quotes from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“If after reading this book you come to my home and brutally murder me, I do not blame you.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“When you convert a good book to a film. stupid things happen”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“Girls like good-looking guys, and I am not very good-looking. In fact, I sort of look like a pudding”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“The best ideas are always the simplest.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“Usually it's when your guard is down that you find yourself saying the most dick sentences of your life.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“We used to be pretty good friends, but fourteen-year-old girls are psychotic.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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...”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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).”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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?”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“But the hardest is watching your son watching his friend die.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“Theory: People always get fired up when an unattractive girl an unattractive dude are dating each other.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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?”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“I am the Thomas Edison of conversational stupidity.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from 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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“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.”
― Jesse Andrews, quote from Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

About the author

Popular quotes

“Hope is a constant companion in this life. It is the one thing that neither cruel nature, God, nor other men can wrench from us. Health, wealth, beloved brothers and sisters, children, friends, the past, the future - all can be stolen from us as easily as an unguarded purse. But our greatest treasure, hope, remains. It is a sturdy little motor within, purring, ticking, driving us on when reason would suggest surrender. It is both the most pathetic and noblest thing about us, the most absurd and the most admirable quality we possess, for as long as we have hope, we also have the capacity for love, for caring, for decency.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Twilight Eyes

“J'ai encore un vif souvenir de Freud me disant : "Mon cher Jung, promettez-moi de ne jamais abandonner la théorie sexuelle. C'est le plus essentiel ! Voyez-vous, nous devons en faire un dogme, un bastion inébranlable." Il me disait cela plein de passion et sur le ton d'un père disant : "Promets-moi une chose, mon cher fils : va tous les dimanches à l'église !" Quelque peu étonné, je lui demandai : "Un bastion -- contre quoi ?" Il me répondit : "Contre le flot de vase noire de…" Ici il hésita un moment pour ajouter : "… de l'occultisme !" Ce qui m'alarma d'abord, c'était le "bastion" et le "dogme" ; un dogme c'est-à-dire une profession de foi indiscutable, on ne l'impose que là où l'on veut une fois pour toutes écraser un doute. Cela n'a plus rien d'un jugement scientifique, mais relève uniquement d'une volonté personnelle de puissance.
Ce choc frappa au cœur notre amitié. Je savais que je ne pourrais jamais faire mienne cette position. Freud semblait entendre par "occultisme" à peu près tout ce que la philosophie et la religion -- ainsi que la parapsychologie qui naissait vers cette époque -- pouvaient dire de l'âme. Pour moi, la théorie sexuelle était tout aussi "occulte" -- c'est-à-dire non démontrée, simple hypothèse possible, comme bien d'autres conceptions spéculatives. Une vérité scientifique était pour moi une hypothèse momentanément satisfaisante, mais non un article de foi éternellement valable. (p. 244)”
― C.G. Jung, quote from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Somewhere in the crowd was at least one potential friend who'd understand the fundamental value of goofing off.
Because if not, how boring would that be?”
― Alyson Noel, quote from Radiance

“By the following morning, Anthony was drunk. By afternoon, he was hungover.
His head was pounding, his ears were ringing, and his brothers, who had been surprised to discover him
in such a state at
their club, were talking far too loudly.
Anthony put his hands over his ears and groaned.Everyone was talking far too loudly.
“Kate boot you out of the house?” Colin asked, grabbing a walnut from a large pewter dish in the middle
their table and
splitting it open with a viciously loud crack.
Anthony lifted his head just far enough to glare at him.
Benedict watched his brother with raised brows and the vaguest hint of a smirk. “She definitely booted
him out,” he said to Colin. “Hand me one of those walnuts, will you?”
Colin tossed one across the table. “Do you want the crackers as well?”
Benedict shook his head and grinned as he held up a fat, leather-bound book. “Much more satisfying to
smash them.”
“Don’t,” Anthony bit out, his hand shooting out to grab the book, “even think about it.”
“Ears a bit sensitive this afternoon, are they?”
If Anthony had had a pistol, he would have shot them both, hang the noise.
“If I might offer you a piece of advice?” Colin said, munching on his walnut.
“You might not,” Anthony replied. He looked up. Colin was chewing with his mouth open. As this had
been strictly forbidden while growing up in their household, Anthony could only deduce that Colin was
displaying such poor manners only to make more noise. “Close your damned mouth,” he muttered.
Colin swallowed, smacked his lips, and took a sip of his tea to wash it all down. “Whatever you did,
apologize for it. I know you, and I’m getting to know Kate, and knowing what I know—”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Anthony grumbled.
“I think,” Benedict said, leaning back in his chair, “that he’s telling you you’re an ass.”
“Just so!” Colin exclaimed.
Anthony just shook his head wearily. “It’s more complicated than you think.”
“It always is,” Benedict said, with sincerity so false it almost managed to sound sincere.
“When you two idiots find women gullible enough to actually marry you,” Anthony snapped, “then you
may presume to
offer me advice. But until then ...shut up.”
Colin looked at Benedict. “Think he’s angry?”
Benedict quirked a brow. “That or drunk.”
Colin shook his head. “No, not drunk. Not anymore, at least. He’s clearly hungover.”
“Which would explain,” Benedict said with a philosophical nod, “why he’s so angry.”
Anthony spread one hand over his face and pressed hard against his temples with his thumb and middle
finger. “God above,”
he muttered. ‘‘What would it take to get you two to leave me alone?”
“Go home, Anthony,” Benedict said, his voice surprisingly gentle.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from The Viscount Who Loved Me

“They turned their attention to the wardrobe that held several Armani suits, all of them individually tailored to fit Humpty’s unique stature and held up on hangers shaped like hula hoops.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from The Big Over Easy

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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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