Quotes from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“It had that kind of open-ended fear to it - like that feeling you get when you're driving and you see a cop. And you're not speeding. You don't have drugs. But you're just thinking, I hope he doesn't notice I'm driving.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“When you're in a relationship with someone who's selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it's this souped-up shine. And you feel like you're in the club. And you don't even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Bears are simultaneously so graceful and so strong. Bears know who they are, but they often don’t know who you are, which is why they kill you.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I'm a big fan of pastries the size of a baby that contain enough calories for a year. That seems like an effective use of time.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I was a big dreamer and never particularly good at anything--a real dilemma. I wasn't terrible. I was just... okay. If you're terrible, you can write everybody off, like, "I don't know what the hell those idiots are doing?" I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Sometimes, when you want to be in a place so badly, you'll do anything.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I try to think up material that might apply to the subjects they are studying. How many mitochondria does it take to power a cell? One. Because mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Not ready for prime time, that one.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I wake up at 4:30 am to jump on a plane, which is that part of the morning before the earth even exists. Before they've even programmed the Matrix. You walk out of your apartment and the road isn't even there. You walk out of your house, and there's just a guy with a laptop who yells, "We need a road, stat!" "How 'bout a building, Tank!”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“So I’m standing in a tree thirty feet above the pond with my three friends and my friend Pat says, “Dude, jump!” And I look down at the water, which is so far away, and I say, “That doesn’t seem like a good plan.” And they said, “Dude, we already jumped, it’s no biggie. What’s the worst thing that could happen? It’s only watah” (that’s “water” with a Boston accent), which is really flawed logic, that watah logic. I learn later that many bad things historically have happened in water. Shark attacks. Drowning. Bad sex. But my friend Nick makes an argument that in Massachusetts is irrefutable. He’s like, “Do it.” So I do.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I thought, Hey, maybe these people shouldn’t be making up holidays to drink more. Maybe if they drank less they might be able to title their newspaper articles more specifically. For example, I would title this last article “Drunk Driver Hits Drunk Walker Drunkety-Drunk I’m So Drunk.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“It was my first brush with live performance. And delusion. •”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase “Don’t tell anyone.” But not about creepy things. I don’t want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like I wouldn’t make the soccer team and my father would say, “Don’t tell anyone.” And I would say, “They’re gonna know when they show up to the games and I’m not on the team and I’m crying.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Looking back on it, could there possible have been a more confusing acronym for trying to keep kids from experimenting with drugs than DARE?
"Kids, we’re here today to DARE you not to do drugs! We DARE you to accept our DARE!"

"Office, does that mean you want us not to do drugs, or to do drugs?"
“We DARE you not to do drugs!”

"But I thought we weren’t supposed to do things We’re dared to do. If you dared me to jump out of a tree, I should do that, right?"

"It’s just an acronym, son."

"What is an acronym?”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“This is my situation. I'm the kind of person who, for fun, writes articles called 'Aviation Club Soars into Orbit!' and an unhappy bully I've never heard of is sending out envoys.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I was made to believe that my life was going to be fixed and it wasn't. I'm still the same loser who had flown to Los Angeles on my sister's frequent flier miles just six days before.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“also put up with it because I couldn’t believe how lucky I was just to be with her. When you’re in a relationship with someone who’s selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it’s this souped-up shine. And you feel like you’re in the club. And you don’t even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“High school is not unlike a Mormon fundamentalist cult where the women are claimed by the older and more powerful.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“I check my phone messages and email about forty-five times a day. I don’t even know what I’m expecting to get in these messages. Maybe Visa will call and say, “We just realized that we owe you money!” or I’ll get an email from a high school classmate that says, “We’ve reconsidered and we’ve decided you were cool after all.” Whatever”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“If you’re terrible, you can write everybody off, like, “I don’t know what the hell those idiots are doing?” I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me. In”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“That one’s yours and that one’s mine.” Like we’re cars. And I don’t feel like I’ve ever been one of the good cars. No one’s ever seen me and said, “I get that one!” They’re more like, “I get that one? Um, okay.” Or even, “I get that one? You owe me.” It’s so sad to think that people are incurring debt based on my appearance. I’d hate to hurt someone’s credit score. So”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Growing up, I was a big fan of the Indiana Jones movies. I watched them again recently and found them to be misleading. Aspiring archeologists across the world probably show up to their first day of work with their weather-worn fedoras and their whips and they’re like, “Where’s the cavern of jewels?” And their boss is like, “Actually, today we’re gonna start off by dusting thousands of miles of nothing.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

“Well, I’m not sure what happened next, but I ended up peeing on Mrs. Jarvis’s lawn.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories

Popular quotes

“Peter lifted his head. Hook's hair was tangled around his face like a lion's mane and his eyes were painfully clear, all teasing and mirth gone from his mouth.
He took Peter's chin in his hand, his fingers calloused but gentle, and kissed him.
Everything in the world grew quiet and Peter's body grew loud. The caress of Hook's fingertips under his chin made his pulse catch, his throat flushing, shoulders tightening. He could only seem to breathe in, breathe Hook in deeper. Hook's lips were dry, and he tasted like salt and sweet wine. He smelled like gunpowder and the sea and he was everywhere, shifting closer across the leaves, his other arm snaking around Peter's waist, the iron claw pressed flat between his shoulder blades.
Peter dug his fingers into fistfuls of earth, trying to ground himself as Hook pulled them together, tipping Peter's head back with the gentle thrust of his kiss, a momentum that threatened to tilt them both to the ground. Peter was impossibly hot, hot to his fingertips and toes and his skin was crawling with the need to be touched, the shock of that need.
Sweat caught at the back of his shirt. His skin was stark canvas begging for ink, and Hook's touch was going to stain him forever. It was too much, too sudden. Peter recoiled, yanking a knife from his boot and holding it between them. He didn't mean it as a threat, just a way to make distance where none had been.”
― Austin Chant, quote from Peter Darling

“Hope is really just desire disguised, just desperation, aching, dressed up like a prayer.”
― T. Greenwood, quote from Undressing the Moon

“fighting emotion with logic is like bringing a calculator to a knife fight.”
― Josh Sundquist, quote from We Should Hang Out Sometime: Embarrassingly, a True Story

“Thousands of you, Scribe. One of her.”
― Elizabeth Hunter, quote from The Scribe

“She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet.”
― Stieg Larsson, quote from Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy Deluxe Boxed Set

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