Quotes from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“I needed to hear the world but didn't want the world to know I was listening.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“I'd treat myself to a reading marathon all weekend. All the ice cream I could eat, all the pages I could read. Heaven.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“People who have to announce that they are trustworthy deserve to be lied to.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“You're the one who doesn't understand, I've been standing on the edge with you for years.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Where did you live before you came here?" I asked.
"The moon," he said smoothly. "We left because the place had no atmosphere.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Killing people is easier than it should be.” Dad put on his beret. “Staying alive is harder.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Having a friend made everything else suck less.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“wats yr typ?
people who can spell”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Note: 'family' does NOT only mean a biological unit composed of people who share genetic markers or legal bonds, headed by a heterosexual-mated pair. Family is much, much more than that.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“The world is crazy. You need a license to drive a car and go fishing. You don't need a license to start a family. Two people have sex and BAM! Perfectly innocent kid is born whose life will be screwed up by her parents forever.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“I swallowed the fear. It’s always there– fear– and if you don’t stay on top of it, you’ll drown. I swallowed again and stood tall, shoulders broad, arms loose. I was balanced, ready to move. My body said, “Yeah, you’re bigger and stronger, but if you touch this, I will hurt you.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Do you know how much women loathe it when guys think every show of negative emotion is tied to our menstrual cycle, like we're sheep or something?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“I kissed him until everything that hurt inside me melted into a pool of black water so deep I couldn’t touch the bottom. As long as I was touching him, I wouldn’t drown.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Can't escape pain, kiddo. Battle through it and you get stronger.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“My good sense bitch slapped my estrogen and told her to get a grip.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Everyone is born a freak," notes Hayley. "Every newborn baby, wet and hungry and screaming, is a fresh-hatched freak who wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. . . . Most teenagers wind up in high school. And high school is where the zombification process becomes deadly.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“My earbuds were in, but I wasn't playing music. I needed to hear the world but didn't want the world to know I was listening.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“The laws of the universe dictate that for every positive action, there is an unequal and sucky reaction.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Leaning against my father, the sadness finally broke open inside me, hollowing out my heart and leaving me bleeding. My feet felt rooted in the dirt. There were more than two bodies buried here. Pieces of me that I didn’t even know were under the ground. Pieces of dad, too.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Until then we're going to keep making memories like this, moments when we're the only two people in the whole world. And when we get scared or lonely or confused, we'll pull out these memories and wrap them around us and they'll make us feel safe. And strong.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Apologies mean nothing if you don't mean it.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“The trick to surviving an interrogation is patience. Don’t offer up anything. Don’t explain. Answer the question and only the question that is asked so you don’t accidentally put your head in a noose.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Ouch," he said.
"Move your foot."
"No."
"Go away."
"Glad to see you, too."
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"You missed the bus," he said.
"I'm sick."
"Need chicken soup?"
"Actually, it's my period," I lied. "Killer cramps."
"Chocolate and a heating pad?"
"How do you know that?"
"I have an older sister and my mom is a kick-ass feminist," he said. "I'm probably the only guy in school who can buy tampons without having a seizure. Look, at that, I can even say the word. 'Tampon, tampon, tampon.' If you say it enough, it stops sounding like a word, know what I mean?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“Yes it is, because you can only be brave if you're scared.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“The books I'd checked out of the library earlier in the week were still stacked on my bureau, whispering my name and begging to be read.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“I am an owl, bird of the night. I see everything. I know everything.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“The gloaming that closed over us the cemetery had crawled inside his skin.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

“All of my answers were drawings of armored unicorns.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from The Impossible Knife of Memory

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Popular quotes

“Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own “hand waving” explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other’s. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other’s. How could she care for the other if she can’t even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, “Self-absorption kills empathy.” The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.”
― Frans de Waal, quote from The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

“So many people are gone that I can’t even mourn them properly. It would take every hour of every day to do it. I want to hold on to them, to think of them, but I would never get any living done if I gave them all the time they deserve. Especially now, when we’re barely living as it is—barely surviving. I hug Ana’s bag to my chest and sob. I cry over the things in my dead friend’s bag and for all the things we’ve lost so far. I don’t know why I thought saving my tears for Alaska was a good idea. It was stupid as fuck. There’s no point in saving things for later if later never comes.”
― Sarah Lyons Fleming, quote from All the Stars in the Sky

“Only when I turned thirty did I finally feel for the first time that I was free, that I could live as I liked, as an individual. It's as if at thirty, I'd been born for the first time. Until then, I was never more than someone's tool.”
― quote from Autobiography of a Geisha

“You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.”
― N.K. Jemisin, quote from The Obelisk Gate

“Where misunderstanding dwells, misuse will not be far behind. No theory in the history of science has been more misused and abused by cranks and charlatans—and misunderstood by people struggling in good faith with difficult ideas—than quantum mechanics.”
― Sean Carroll, quote from The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

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