Judy Blume · 144 pages
Rating: (119.3K votes)
“dope-pushers hang around there. But taking dope is even dumber than smoking, so nobody’s going to hook me! We live on”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“windup train that made a lot of noise. Every time it bumped into something it turned around and went the other way. Fudge liked it a lot. He likes anything that’s noisy.”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“Ralph arrived first. He’s really fat. And he isn’t even four years old. He doesn’t say much either. He grunts and grabs a lot, though. Usually his mouth is stuffed full of something.”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“What’s next on your reading list? Discover”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“Nobody ever worries about me the way they worry about Fudge. If I decided not to eat they’d probably never even notice!”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“I thought how great it would be if we could trade in Fudge for a nice cocker spaniel.”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“Jennie had a big smile on her face. Next thing I knew there was a puddle on”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“Berman’s foot measure. Then he turned it around and I put my right foot in. That’s another reason why my mother thinks Mr. Berman is good at selling”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“Jimmy Fargo’s birthday party. All the other guys got to take home goldfish in little plastic bags. I won him because I guessed there were three hundred and forty-eight jelly beans in Mrs. Fargo’s jar. Really,”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“My biggest problem is my brother, Farley Drexel Hatcher. He’s two-and-a-half years old. Everybody calls him Fudge. I”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“One night my father came home from the office all excited. He told us Mr. and Mrs. Yarby were coming to New York. He’s the president of the Juicy-O company. He”
― Judy Blume, quote from Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
“I had a bizarre rapport with this mirror and spent a lot of time gazing into the glass to see who was there. Sometimes it looked like me. At other times, I could see someone similar but different in the reflection. A few times, I caught the switch in mid-stare, my expression re-forming like melting rubber, the creases and features of my face softening or hardening until the mutation was complete. Jekyll to Hyde, or Hyde to Jekyll. I felt my inner core change at the same time. I would feel more confident or less confident; mature or childlike; freezing cold or sticky hot, a state that would drive Mum mad as I escaped to the bathroom where I would remain for two hours scrubbing my skin until it was raw.
The change was triggered by different emotions: on hearing a particular piece of music; the sight of my father, the smell of his brand of aftershave. I would pick up a book with the certainty that I had not read it before and hear the words as I read them like an echo inside my head. Like Alice in the Lewis Carroll story, I slipped into the depths of the looking glass and couldn’t be sure if it was me standing there or an impostor, a lookalike.
I felt fully awake most of the time, but sometimes while I was awake it felt as if I were dreaming. In this dream state I didn’t feel like me, the real me. I felt numb. My fingers prickled. My eyes in the mirror’s reflection were glazed like the eyes of a mannequin in a shop window, my colour, my shape, but without light or focus.
These changes were described by Dr Purvis as mood swings and by Mother as floods, but I knew better. All teenagers are moody when it suits them. My Switches could take place when I was alone, transforming me from a bright sixteen-year-old doing her homework into a sobbing child curled on the bed staring at the wall.
The weeping fit would pass and I would drag myself back to the mirror expecting to see a child version of myself. ‘Who are you?’ I’d ask. I could hear the words; it sounded like me but it wasn’t me. I’d watch my lips moving and say it again, ‘Who are you?”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“Pleasure has turned into habit much more quickly than I should have ever thought possible.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
“Because retrieval is a reconstructive process, it can be erroneous. We may reconstruct events the way we would prefer to remember them, rather than the way we experienced them. It is relatively easy to bias people so that they form false memories, “remembering” events in their lives with great clarity, even though they never occurred. This is one reason that eyewitness testimony in courts of law is so problematic: eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. A huge number of psychological experiments show how easy it is to implant false memories into people’s minds so convincingly that people refuse to admit that the memory is of an event that never happened.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)
“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
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