Quotes from Wish You Were Dead

Todd Strasser ·  236 pages

Rating: (3.5K votes)


“If you've never known someone your own age who's died, you can't imagine what it feels like. It's as if you were walking on a glass floor and it suddenly shatters and now you're falling and falling and there's broken glass in the air all around you and no bottom in sight.”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead


“Some people get more of a chance to show who they are. Other people never get the chance.”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead


“But then again, impossible never became rumour, did it?”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead


“Sometimes you know when someone is telling you the truth.”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead


“Why do we believe one stranger and not another?”
― Todd Strasser, quote from Wish You Were Dead



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About the author

Todd Strasser
Born place: in New York, New York, The United States
Born date May 5, 1950
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Popular quotes

“...that, to repeat what I heard for years and years and suspect you’ve been hearing over and over, yourself, something’s meaning is nothing more or less than its function. Et cetera et cetera et cetera. Has she done the thing with the broom with you? No? What does she use now? No. What she did with me--I must have been eight, or twelve, who remembers--was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, ’Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?’ Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of the domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence. No? What now, then? With pencils? No matter. Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as fundamentalness.”
― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Broom of the System


“I guess I could go and get a bunch of knives from the Kitchen aisles and throw them at the intruders. So lame. I wanted to wring my own neck for being so lame.”
― Emmy Laybourne, quote from Sky on Fire


“It forced me to realise that I'd been blaming you for not being flawless. And none of us is flawless.' Another sigh. 'I was so angry with myself for what happened to Michael and Lucy that I had to turn my anger somewhere else and you were the easiest target.”
― Val McDermid, quote from Cross and Burn


“I want to see the king," I said, after explaining who I was.
"Wonderful," said the ancient Nkumai who sat on a cushion near the corner pole of the house. "I'm glad for you."
That was all, and apparently he meant to say no more. "Why are you so glad?" I asked.
"Because it's good for every human being to have an unfulfilled wish. It makes all of life so poignant.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Treason


“And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine:”
― William Gibson, quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive


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