Quotes from Things Not Seen

Andrew Clements ·  256 pages

Rating: (23.1K votes)


“Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't three lefts make a right? Two wrongs don't make a right, but don't two negatives make a positive?”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“But fear doesn't need doors and windows. It works from the inside.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“Watch TV or something." That's what the note says.
So I say to myself, Fine. But I think I'll do the "or something" part.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“It's about 65 degrees, so it feels like when the air conditioner is up on high. I can bear it, so I'm going for a walk. Today. Right now. In the sunshine. Because I can.

Because I want to. Because I'm not going to just sit around and wait for stuff to happen anymore. I'm still me, and I have a life. It's a weird life, but it's still mine.

It's still mine.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“And then I see what she means. Because I did have to tell her, just like she had to tell me all of this. I had to trust her. Sometimes you have to tell someone else what it's like. Because if you don't, you'll go nuts.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen



“We both hang up, but it's like there's still a connection. I can feel it.

And it feels good.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“Only once. She called, asked could we send her two thousand dollars—two thousand more than the four she already stole when she left.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“Aha. The mom doesn’t know. She’s fishing. This next part has to be just right, or I’m blacklisted by the mother and hated by the daughter. The first would be an inconvenience; the second would be a tragedy.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“There's a strength in the way she carries herself, but she never seems to relax, never lets down her guard.”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen


“and he sees me seeing him see me. Anyway,”
― Andrew Clements, quote from Things Not Seen



About the author

Andrew Clements
Born place: in Camden, New Jersey, The United States
Born date January 1, 1949
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Popular quotes

“Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from What's Wrong with the World


“For louers heauen must passe by sorrowes hell.”
― Edmund Spenser, quote from The Faerie Queene


“...the very old men [...] believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.”
― William Faulkner, quote from A Rose for Emily and Other Stories


“I don’t understand,” said the scientist, “why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves.” “How curious,” said the lemming. “The one thing I don’t understand is why you human beings don’t.”
― James Thurber, quote from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty


“He explained that the leaf had fallen over and over from that same tree so I would stop trying to understand.”
― Carlos Castaneda, quote from A Separate Reality


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