Andrea Portes Quotes

I'm not sure why anyone on the face of the planet would want to use a bow and arrow. I mean, it seems like a fairly limited field of expertise and usefulness. Unless your name is Katniss.

Don't worry. We do not have to talk about. We are Russian. We do not talk about feelings all the time and no one has shrink."
"I think you all have a shrink. And I think the shrink's name is vodka."
This gets a smile out of both of them.

Okay, I have a follow-up question."
Madden exhales. "Yes."
"Is this car worth a lot in your human money?"
"Paige, there's nothing around. Okay? You're going to be fine. Just get in the car, turn on the ignition, and do the obstacle course."
"In that order?"
"Yes."

...

A 2016 Dodge Viper SRT costs exactly $87,895. I know, because I just crashed one.

You know why you keep losing, 'cause, guess what, you're a fucking loser.

I bet she thought she was getting into a fight with a vanilla wafer on roller skates but little did she know she was getting into a fight with a spider sandwich.

Katerina, stop! Or I'll shoot!"
"Then fucking shoot!"
"Okay, I'm gonna shoot you in the ankle, okay? They say that's the safest place."
"Don't shoot me, just go home."
"I can't! Okay, I'm gonna shoot you now, and then when I do, just stay down, okay?"
"Why are you so weird?! If you are going to shot, then fucking shoot!"
"O-kay! Are you ready?!"
BANG.
She goes down.
I run up to her, bleeding out the side of her calf.
"Oh, I meant to hit a little lower, actually."
She gets up. I think she actually believes she's going to catch up with these guys. Gunshot and all.
I kick her in the chest.
"This is interesting friendship.

Let's just call it like it is, no need to pretty it up. I care what other people think of me. I'm not Jesus Christ. I'm just a girl in the world.

So, dearest Madden, on a scale of one to ten ... am I fired?"
"What, for completely disobeying orders and bringing public enemy number one back to the center of the liberal universe so we would have to actually pardon him?"
"Something like that."
"You know, this may surprise you, but the president of the United States, your commander in chief, wanted me to express her gratitude. She said she admires your moxie."
"Wow. The president of the United States admires my moxie. Are you jealous?"
"Maybe. It's possible. No one has ever said anything about my moxie."
I slurp through my smirk.

I miss my room. I miss my bed. I miss being a little punk with no care in the world, giving two fucks about it, just looking for trouble. I guess I found it.

I look out past the corn and the wheat and wonder how many sets of bones are buried, unspoken, keeping their stories to themselves in the dirt. I wonder if they know the sky is bright blue today and the air smells sweet. I wonder if they still listen in.

There's no marker on the entrance to this entire complex, or on many of the buildings, but if there was I would call this one "Super Secret Spy Swimming Complex", or SSSSC, for short.

I mean if there was any justice in the world you wouldn't even have to go to school during your period. You'd just stay home for five days and eat chocolate and cry.

I cared what everybody thought more than what I thought. Or more than my heart thought. And that makes me an idiot.

Out west everything has its own space. Every little ramshackle cabin, shack, hut sits perched atop its own little piece of destiny with room to breathe, room to live, room to die. You'll see them, the dead ones, sitting by the side of the road like some faded gray and rotting mystery, thinking about the good ol days before trains and cars and wanting more.

There were babies, and toddlers, and five-year-old boys in Batman shirts. There was even a little girl dressed as Elsa. For no reason. It's not Halloween. But go ahead, cutie pie, you dress up as Elsa all you want. You do you.

If you turned a Labrador into a person you would make Brad Kline. He's happy and gushy and about as interesting and complex as a tree stump.

But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5-o-'clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevitable, desperate, begs to be filled up. And nothing, not shame, not God, not a new microwave, not a wide-screen TV or that new diet with grapefruits, can ever, ever fill it.
Underneath all that white noise there's a lack.

Okay, listen, I don't know what dumb lines you are used to giving girls so they fall all over you but I just want you to know that I wasn't born yesterday so I am gonna go now and leave you to whatever dumb idiot girl is gonna buy that line.

Pedaling fast fast fast, this is my only chance to stop it. This is the place where it looks like everything is gonna go horribly wrong and there's no hope, but then because it's a movie there is hope after all and there is a surprise that changes everything and everyone breathes a sigh of relief and everybody gets to go home and feel good about themselves and maybe fall asleep in the car.

But if I can keep my mind on these pages I don't have to care. I can make this all just go away. Poof. I can stay in this book and then this book gets to be real and everything else gets to be fake and who cares anyway.

You get one chance.

You get to do this and that and you don't even know when it goes from swirling forward and around and around in circles to just a plain cold stop and nothing more. Can you believe it? All this time I've spent weighing this and weighing that, worrying about this and worrying about that, living back then and living forward, caring about so-and-so, too, but never living here, here, this moment here. Never even acknowledging that this moment even exists, and it hits me like a live volt through the chest.

When I get back to my dorm room, there it is, staring at me from above my bed. The Vladimir Putin calendar. Ha! I guess Katerina got a copy of it for me after my drunken rant at the secret supper club about how I had to ironically have one.
This is a girl after my own heart.
You have to see this calendar.
July: Vladimir Putin fly-fishing topless. March: Vladimir Putin smelling a flower. November: Vladimir Putin holding a puppy. I'm not kidding. Holding a puppy!
I laugh to myself. Katerina sure has my number. Maybe she will be my BFF even after I go back to the States.

Madden sizes me up.
"Did you even ever get Christmas presents ...?"
"Yes. And Hanukkkah presents. And Kwanzaa. Three Kings Day. Also, Saint Lucia Day and Ramadan. It's important not to play favorites. You know ... you never know who could actually be running this thing ... probably important not to put all your eggs in one basket -"
"Stop. Stop talking.

To be honest, she may be kind of scared of the register. Or maybe she can't add. She is a Christian. I don't think they believe in math.

So you're like… living in the margins, making your case in the margins, trying to make a difference maybe, from the margins...but nobody really wants to listen to you. To see you.
'Cause you're not the story they want to tell.

Pedaling fast fast fast, this is the moment. One of those movie moments you never think is gonna happen to you, but it happens to you, and now it's here.

You get one chance.
You get to do this thing one time and you don't even know when it goes from swirling forward and around and around in circles to just a plain cold stop and nothing more. Can you believe it? All this time I've spent weighing this and weighing that, worrying about this and worrying about that, living back then and living forward, caring about what so-and-so thinks and about so-and-so, too, but never living here, here, this moment here. Never even acknowledging that this moment even exists, and it hits me, like a live volt through the chest.
This moment here.
This is all you get.
Before you are part of the sky

I am an excellent driver.
In my mind. When nobody's watching. I could drive circles around you. And even East Los Viva.
However, there is the small issue that in the human realm, when I am driving an actual vehicle, which is rare, and there is someone in the passenger seat, which is even rarer - I have a tendency to get nervous. And a bit neurotic. Okay, fine, let's just face it. I am a terrible driver.

I know they say that's the way the cookie crumbles and all. But you can't help but wonder why there's any cookie-crumbling going on in the first place.

I look like vanilla pudding so nobody knows that on the inside I am spider soup.

I know a lot of people think that whole God thing is a joke but I just get a feeling he's up there somewhere.

I do what he says and I close my eyes and open my mouth and the next thing I know he's got his twenty-eight-year-old tongue in my thirteen-year-old mouth and all I can think is that I don't think the hero is supposed to be doing this.

Ceaseless.
Almost too much for this small frame.
You make me part of the sky.

It doesn't say: "Logan's kid brothers looked like little angels in Star Wars pajamas and that fucking fuckface tried to shoot them dead, and what's the point in God, or anything in the universe after that?"
It doesn't say: "God. Where the fuck were you last night?

I don't know how to act around anybody.