“Sometimes I read the same books over and over and over. What's great about books is that the stuff inside doesn't change. People say you can't judge a book by its cover but that's not true because it says right on the cover what's inside. And no matter how many times you read that book the words and pictures don't change. You can open and close books a million times and they stay the same. They look the same. They say the same words. The charts and pictures are the same colors.
Books are not like people. Books are safe.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“I don't think I'm going to like it at all. I think it's going to hurt. But after the hurt I think maybe something good and strong and beautiful will come out of it.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“I don't like the word soon because you don't know when it's going to sneak up on you and turn into NOW. Or maybe it'll be the kind of soon that never happens.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Understanding people’s difficulties and—just as crucial—helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Empathy isn't as hard as it sounds because people have a lot of the same feelings. And it helps to understand other people because then you can actually care about them sometimes. And help them. And have a friend.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Ignore and ignorance share the same root.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“I feel like Snow White because now I have a bunch of little dwarf friends who love me. I may not know how Scout's overalls feel but I think I know how Snow White's Shoes feel because now I know why Snow White was happy.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“A movie is better than real life because in the movies only the bad guys die. Or you can pick the good movies where the bad guys die and only those. If you get tricked and a good person dies in the movie then you can rewrite it in your head so the good person lives and the part about death is superfluous.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“I know, I say, after he says, This is hard, for the third time. This is what happens when you have a TRM, I tell him. You make a mess. It's okay. You just have to try harder next time.
I am trying hard, Dad says.
I know. You get a sticker.
Thank you.
Okay. You get another sticker for being polite.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Even though I didn't think I'd like empathy it kind of creeps up on you and makes you feel all warm and glowy inside. I don't think I want to go back to life without empathy.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Understanding people’s difficulties and—just as crucial—helping people understand their own difficulties and teaching them concrete ways to help themselves will help them better deal with their own lives and, in turn, ours.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“I think about what Devon would say. You have to Work At It Dad. You have to try even if it's hard and you think you can never do it and you just want to scream and hide and shake your hands over and over and over.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“I wish people would follow the Facial Expressions Chart like they’re supposed to.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Blurring is good for the things you don’t want to see but it doesn’t work so well for the stuff you actually have to Deal With.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Haven’t you ever seen someone standing alone?
I shrug. Just one.
Why don’t you talk to that child?
Because it’s me and Devon told me I shouldn’t talk to myself. Not in public anyway”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“I don’t think you’re disgusting just because you have hair sticking out of your ear. Dad”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Livros não são como pessoas. Livros são seguros.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“She points to some girls who are standing in a circle talking and giggling LOUD. They are bent. What do you think they’re feeling? Like throwing up? She Looks At The Person. Well they’re bending over so much it looks like they’re going to throw up. Do you usually laugh a lot just before you throw up? No. I don’t. But who knows about them?”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“A empatia não é tão difícil quanto parece porque muitos dos sentimentos das pessoas são os mesmos. E isso ajuda a compreender os outros porque aí a gente pode realmente se preocupar com eles de vez em quando. E ajudá-los. E ter amigos. Como Michael. E fazer alguma coisa por eles e fazer com que se sintam tão bem quanto a gente está se sentindo.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“Josh is walking into the principal’s office when I get off the phone.”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
“You have to try even if it’s hard and you think you can never do it and you just want to scream and hide”
― Kathryn Erskine, quote from Mockingbird
Kathryn Erskine
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“She had no criticism of his dress, which was bagged at the knees, dropping at the lapels, rucked around the buttons, while she-although she wore a flowing white cotton-appeared (she knew it and wished it was not so) as starched and pressed as a Baptist in a riding habit.
They were different, and yet not ill matched.
They had both grown used to the attentions that are the eccentric’s lot-the covert glances, smiles, whispers, worse. Lucinda was accustomed to looking at no one in the street. It was an out-of-focus town of men with seas of bobbing hats.
But on this night she felt the streets accept them. She thought: When we are two, they do not notice us. They think us a match. What wisdom does a mob have? It is a hydra, an organism, stupid or dangerous in much of its behaviour, but could it have, in spite of this, a proper judgement about which of its component parts fit best together?
They pushed past bold-eyed young women with too many ribbons and jewels, past tight-laced maidens and complacent merchants with their bellies pushing so forcefully against their waistcoats that their shirts showed above their trousers. Lucinda was happy. Her arm rested on Oscar’s arm.
She thought: Anyone can see I have been crying. She thought: I have pink eyes like a dormouse. But she did not really care.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Oscar and Lucinda
“How is it you speak? What sound is there here?” “You must listen to my voice,” she told me, “and not to my words. What do you hear?” I did as she had instructed me, and heard the silken sliding of the sheet, the whisper of our bodies, the breaking of the little waves, and the beating of my own heart. A hundred questions I had been ready to ask, and it had seemed to me that each of the hundred might bring the New Sun. Her lips brushed mine, and every question vanished, banished from my consciousness as if it had never been. Her hands, her lips, her eyes, the breasts I pressed—all wondrous; but there was more, perhaps the perfume of her hair. I felt that I breathed an endless night … . Lying upon my back, I entered Yesod. Or say, rather, Yesod closed about me. It was only then that I knew I had never been there. Stars in their billions spurted from me, fountains of suns, so that for an instant I felt I knew how universes are born. All folly. Reality displaced it, the kindling of the torch that whips shadows to their corners, and with them all the winged fays of fancy. There was something born between Yesod and Briah when I met with Apheta upon that divan in that circling room, something tiny yet immense that burned like a coal conveyed to the tongue by tongs. That something was myself.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Urth of the New Sun
“Suddenly a great sense of despondency comes over me. To-morrow we shall take the prepositions, I think to myself—and next week we shall have a dictation. In a year’s time you will have by heart fifty questions from the Catechism; in four years you will start the larger multiplication tables. —And so you will grow up, and Time will take you in his pincers—one dumbly, another savagely, or gently or shatteringly. Each will have his own destiny and thus or thus it will overtake you. What help shall I be to you then with my conjugations and enumerations of all the rivers of Germany? Forty of you—forty different lives standing behind you and waiting. How gladly would I help you, if I could. But who can really help another here? Have I even been able to help Adolf Bethke? The bell rings. The first lesson is over.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Road Back
“Play me something that makes me feel;
This soul inside me is made of steel.
Brain is breathing, but heart’s not beating
And, babe, I need you to make things real.
Walk inside me without silence,
Kill the past and change the tense.
Empty gnawing and the ache is soaring;
Take me places that make more sense.”
― Melina Marchetta, quote from The Piper's Son
“In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of these civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last because people treat each other the way they ought to.”
― Leon Uris, quote from QB VII
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