Jaclyn Moriarty Quotes

I'm screwed up, mixed up, messed around, dive-bombing, crashing and burning.

We needed fish, really, but I could not speak Fish.

I hope you feel better today. Please ring me at work if you are dead.

It's tricky being shy. You blame yourself for it, and other people blame you too.

And if we can change things that have already happened if those planes can fly in uneasy formation if that splinter moon can blow away the shadows then anything, anything at all.

t was beautiful, being there with Elliott. It was like there was nothing except him and me. I remember his palms, his chest, his chin, but it was like we were more than just our bodies. As if our essence was there in the darkness.

My father, I never knew, except for this one time when he threw a ball and told me to go fetch it.
"Dad," I said. "Am I a dog?"
"Lydia," he said. "I apologize.

The world is made of more than particles. It's made of things you can't hold in your hand, like fear, love, loss, hope, truth.

It's a vicious cycle. It's like a washing machine with the lid jammed down. -Christina Kratovac (pg 53)

P.P.S. AND YOU CAN TALK. "Just say the word." JUST SAY THE WORD? What kind of expression is that? WHAT WORD WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO SAY ANYWAY? MORON?
Letter from Emily to Charles.

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically:
His rhinoceros smelled like a poppadom: sweaty, salty, strange and strong.
Her editor would cut that line.

Do you think there could be a universe next door?

I am grateful to you for the rest of my life. And when I say "you," I mean every part of you, including your mind and your smile and your giggle and the mad look you get in your eyes sometimes. If you don't believe that your words have got into my soul, take a look at the painting which I took to the art show (it's called The Puppy and the Pyramid, which is what you might call a clue). But if I don't get to kiss you fairly soon, Lyd, I won't have a soul left to speak of.

Are you sure you want me to go after Christina? Lately I've kind of thought I might just give up on that. Plus, didn't you and I need to gaze into each other's eyes first? How will I know how to gaze at Christina? And my pebble kicking? Disaster.

There was something in the moonlight tonight. It was stroking the stonework and spires, leaning into cracks between the cobblestones, caressing the stained-glass windows. She felt her heart lift with magic.

There was plenty of green light left in that orange light Em.

I was still seeing pirates in my old way, as almost-imaginary, adventure-story people with parrots on their shoulders, rather than the kind who shoot cannons at parents.

A choice had to be made when your husband said something unkind. Specifically: be cruel, be strong, or sulk. 'Be cruel' by saying an unkind thing back. 'Be strong' by choosing not to mind. But to do this, you have to use up a piece of your love. You have to shave off enough of the love to forgive. After a while, the piece might grow back, but sometimes not. And if you shave off all the soft curves, you'll be left with a sharp-edged love. 'Sulk' by sulking. Sulking is simply delaying the choice to be cruel or strong.

I think I know you absolutely.

I am a student of love.

Having read several prize-winning novels, Fancy was confident that she now knew the recipe:
1. Write a simple narrative.
2. Make a long list.
3. Scatter the contents of your list throughout your narrative.

Her skin is pale as watermelon sucked free of its juices.

Emily said ... Well, I read that it's important to sleep. While you sleep, the hippopotamus in your brain replays things that happend during the day, e.g. what you studied. So therefore it remembers it for you.

Sure, we sparkled and glittered and flew through the world, but it was only an illusion of flight. We were trapped in the orbit of a man who was no longer truly there.

And then something happened. It was a fragment of time, a breath of time. It was like being in a car in pouring rain and driving under an overpass, and for just that second there is a profound, powerful sense of reprieve- the utter silence of non-rain.

I saw your name in lights last night. It's the middle of the night, and I can't sleep, thinking all my trumpeting thoughts, and I get out of bed, open the curtains, and look into the night full of stars, and you know what I saw? Your name. Like the stars joined up and spelled the word for me. Like a sign.

Distance is the journey. Displacement is the result.

Where was she now, the girl with the thunderstorm heart?

Well, first you have to be very, very funny. I have realized that it is essential for a boy to be funny. Otherwise, what is the point in a boy?

You're making me nervous by being so weird.
But your weirdness is what I like about you.

P.S. I will give you a clue about the person I'm interested in. She gets a very cute dimple in her right cheek when she's trying not to smile. She has a very cute way of pronouncing th, and she wears a cute hat on cold days, which is like a French beret. I once had an appointment with her to Gaze into the Girl's Eyes, which she went and cancelled on me, and I've been waiting all term for a chance to Kiss the Girl.

Bindy Mackenzie talks like a horse.

She's always getting into trouble because she gets bored really really easily. [ ... ]
My mum says it's because Celia has an attention span the size of a sesame seed.
Celia's mum says it's because Celia's identity is unfurling itself slowly, like a tulip bud, and it's a breathtakingly beautiful thing to see.

I was just peeling some potatoes for dinner and they all looked like crisp white potatoes until I cut them in half. Every single one had a rotten, gray core. [ ... ] I feel like the whole world is black, rotting, and evil. Even when it looks crisp on the outside, that's a lie, because you can't trust anything - on the inside it's nothing like mold. [ ... ] So, see, nothing good is ever going to happen, and anyone who says it is, is lying to you.

Madeleine Tully turned fourteen yesterday, but today she did not turn anything. Oh, wait. She turned a page.

Dear Complete and Utter Stranger,
The first thing that I have to say is that I hate oatmeal. I really hate it. And you know what? If you like oatmeal at all? I mean even the tiniest bit? I mean, say you were lost in the Himalayas, right, and you hadn't eaten anything except a Mars Bar for about seven years, right, and you're really cold and your fingers are all dropping off, right, and you look behind this rock, and there's this bowl of oatmeal?
Say you would even think about eating the oatmeal?
Well, JUST DON'T BOTHER WRITING TO ME, OKAY?

How about we meet at midnight tomorrow and try this. I close my eyes, believe in you, and there you'll be.

Her parents were going to a conference for the weekend. The conference was called "Lawyers are Lovely, Great and Superb: so Why Does Everyone Think that They are Liars, Greedy and Scum?" and Mr Thomson was doing a speech called "Ten Tips to Make Lawyers as Popular as Doctors.

If you're looking pretty and your hair's all shiny, and there's a glint in your eye, and you say sorry like you mean it, and then kiss me on the mouth and let your hand kind of slip under my shirt so it's on my back, well, I'd sure forgive and forget.

Who knows if all our brains are inventing the same thing? I mean, how do we know that the thing YOUR eyes see and call "red" is the same thing that I call "red"?

3:12 pm
Secretly, I admit, I find many of my classmates annoying. I've often thought to myself, 'Good grief, these people are five-year-olds. Why must I spend my days among them?' But have I ever said such things aloud? No. I have been nothing but generous to them, and kept these thoughts to myself.
And how have they repaid me? Have they been grateful or kind? Ho NO!

You've loved with intensity and passion, and have learned to hide your heartache, learned to press your handkerchief back into your pocket and pretend that you are okay.

Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it's stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn't do it.

People always tell me I shouldn't run so far because I'm too young and my bones will fall to pieces. But I do it anyway-mainly because I love the bit when you finish and get to stop running.

Ah, even sitting here on my front porch, looking out over the fields, there's a part of me aches to see him walking. To conjure him out of the sunlight in the distance. The shape of my dad, I can almost see it, crossing the field toward me. Come to put his arm around me, reach out an arm to my mother as well, and I'll close my eyes and just breathe.

And she looks at me with her eyes open wide and a face that says: Oh my God, I'm muckin' around in my sexy Jesus-boots, in my crazy dreamworld, and I've opened the door and let you in on my crazy dreamworld and that's so embarrassing but, actually, who cares? because it's funny.

She left behind her giant M, she's not getting my cabinet
-Toby

Where are they now? she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the I-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories, searching for her things: She saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away.

It's a lot easier to be crazy or mad than to just get on with living.

Dear Amelia,
I hear there are giant jellyfish in the Arctic,
tentacles longer than train carriages.
Haystacks fly over cities in whirlwinds, and fish frogs and turtles rain on towns.
There are spaces of perfect nothing that they call black holes.
Nothing's impossible- that's what you think I'm trying to say.
But I'm not.
There are things that are impossible - unimaginable even- and here they are: That I broke you.
Betrayed you.
Said I'd given up on you. Sent you flying to a park in a thunderstorm.
That I've been wrong about you all along- saw something in your face each time you faded to your past, when the opposite was true.
That all this time you've been lost and that I won't get a second chance to find you.
Amelia your name is a song. It's a name you can't say without smiling or crying, without casting both shadows and light. But there are too many places to hide or get lost in a name like Amelia.
So this is me shouting that name. They say nobody ever escapes from a black hole. They don't know the strength in my Amelia. The strength in your grip when you want to stay out dancing- the strength in your wicked smile.

Riley

This is what I want you all to do. I want you to open a new document and type up a list of three problems in your life. Not the universe's life - your own. Underneath, type the solutions."
"If we know the solutions," said Belle, "they're not problems."
"Exactly," said Denny. "You do know the answers to most of your problems. Somewhere deep inside, you know.

I hate those TV shows where characters talk about one thing, such as their patient on the operation table (let's say they're a doctor), then you realize they're actually talking about actually talking about themselves. The patient's open-heart surgery is nothing compared to their own messed-up heart or whatever. It's selfish. And means they're not concentrating, which is medical negligence.

Here come the colours of Madeleine, thought Jack, and the colours went right through his bloodstream now, sailing on tiny boats - spinnakers fixed with little toothpicks.

Emily: YOU CAN'T SPEAK AND TYPE AT THE SAME TIME, BINDY!
Bindy: Watch me.

I never saw anything like it. He was like the bit in the movie where Tom Cruise is a lawyer and he's decided he's really going to win this case, for the sake of justice and the American way, and that? And it's suddenly like bang-bang-bang - grabbing files off shelves and slamming them down on the desk and punching numbers in the telephone and shaking out the phone cord dramatically , and you know, snapping out instructions to all the assistants around the desk, like: "Get me all the phone records of the President of the United States for the last fifty years," and "Get me the names of every client who ever ate a banana," and "Let's get some Chinese take-out up here, on the double!