Jesse Andrews Quotes

But the hardest is watching your son watching his friend die.

And the point of Rachel the Film should really have been to express how awful and shitty that loss was, that she would have become a person with a long awesome life if she had been allowed to continue living, and that this was just a stupid meaningless loss, a motherfucking loss, a loss loss loss fucking loss, there was no fucking meaning to it, there was nothing that could come out of it ...

Look, I was an idiot. I didn't want people to think that I had a crush, so I decided to give everyone the impression that I truly, honestly hated Madison Harter. For no reason. Just thinking about this makes me want to punch myself in the eyeball.

The balance of power had shifted in ways that none of us yet understood. There was tension in the air. It was a moment of great opportunity, and greater danger.

And if a jock. God forbid, witnesses you hobnobbing with theater kids, he will immediately assume you are gay, and there is no force on earth greater than the fear jocks have homosexuals. None. It's like the Jewish fear of Nazis, except the complete opposite with regard to who is beating the crap out of whom. So I guess it's more like the Nazi fear of Jews.

Also, she does this thing women sometimes do with their eyebrows where they just completely shave them off and draw news ones in a different weird place with a Sharpie or something, and the more you think about it, the more your stomach starts churning around and you want to claw your own head.

Usually it's when your guard is down that you find yourself saying the most dick sentences of your life.

There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you, and then when it does, that's when you feel like shit.

We loved it. We loved how slow it was. We love that it took forever. Actually, we never wanted it to end. We loved the jungle, the rafts, the ridiculous armor and helmets ... I think most of all we loved that it didn't have a happy ending for anyone. The whole time we were sort of expecting that someone would survive because that's how stories work: Even if everything is a total disaster, someone lives to tell the tale. But not with Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Hell no. Everyone dies. That's awesome.

I learned nothing. Seriously, I can't tell you anything about Jews, I am a Jew, and I still deserve an F in Jewishness
I think it's Judaism
See, that's what I'm talking about. I don't know what Jews believe. Like, do Jews believe in heaven? Are we suppose to believe in that?
I don't know.
Yeah. Is there Jewish heaven? What happens when Jews die? You know?

So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks. Do you accept that premise? Of course you do. It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad?

You cats mind if I make it a trio?' he asked me, and it was not a huge surprise that a dude of his appearance was speaking in Jazz Voice.

One thing I've learned about people is that the easiest way to get them to like you is to shut up and let them do the talking.

When you convert a good book to a film. stupid things happen

Have you ever noticed that people look like either rodents or birds? And you can classify them that way, like, I definitely have more of a rodent face, but you look like a penguin.

Cat Stevens is also the only other member of the family who enjoys eating the meats that Dad brings home from the Strip, although sometimes he expresses his enjoyment by barfing.

It was time to ride the wave or drown in a sea of crazy.

I think I might have a disorder where your emotions frequently malfunction and a lot of the time you're sitting there feeling something inappropriate. It should be called Emotional Moron Disorder

The plot of the movie seemed stupid to them: Aguirre and everyone were searching for a city that it said right at the beginning did not exist. They didn't understand that that was the whole point. They didn't get that it was awesome because it was so insanely meaningless.

Greg: Scott, great horde.
My realization was that I could never *actually* live a life where I had to be constantly doing things like praising a dude's horde.
So that made me feel better about myself.

Earl and I actually didn't have much in common with each other, either, but we were the only ten-year-olds in Pittsburgh who liked Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and that counted for something. It actually counted for a lot.

Also, the movie had the first breasts I had ever seen, although they were not what I had been led to believe that breasts looked like. They were like cow udders, and one of them was bigger than the other. (In retrospect, this may have been responsible for my complete lack of sexual development, which we've already talked about, I guess at least I wasn't going around saying things like, 'The best thing about your two boobs is that they are the same size.

So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don't feel like lying to you. She didn't have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn't fall in love. She seemed less pissed with me after my stupid outburst, but she basically just went from irritable to quiet.

I ain't eatin out in no Lawrenceville," said Earl with disdain

So. If this was some normal fictional young-adult book, this is the part of the story where after the film, the entire high school would rise to their feet and applaud, and Earl and I would find True Acceptance and begin to Truly Believe in Ourselves and Rachel would somehow miraculously make a recovery, or maybe she would die but we would Always Have Her to Thank for Making Us Discover Our Inner Talent, and Madison would become my girlfriend and I would get to nuzzle her boobs like an affectionate panda cub whenever I wanted.
That is why fiction sucks. None of that happened. Instead, pretty much everything happened that I was afraid of, except worse.

You can't wrap your head around not living. You can't actually believe that you're not gonna be alive.

The most beautiful thing about you is that you're not a sock puppet.

Let's face it: Most girls are annoying. I mean, most humans are annoying, so it's not specific to girls. Also, I don't really mean "annoying." I guess I mean that most humans like to try to fuck up your plans.

The point is that by seventh period, he's been exposed to four hours of grinding stupidity, and he wants to slit his wrists. For the first ten minutes of lunch, he shakes his head angrily at everything I say. Then eventually he snaps out of it.

The young nihilists," Dad called us.
"What are nihilists?"
"Nihilists believe that nothing has any meaning. They believe in nothing."
"Yeah," said Earl. "I'm a nihilist.
"Me, too," I said.
"Good for you," Dad said, grinning. Then he stopped grinning and said, "Don't tell your mom.

If after reading this book you come to my home and brutally murder me, I do not blame you.

Jesus Christ in a cockwagon.

Mom has never allowed video games in the house, except for the educational kind, like Math Blaster, and that wasn't so much to teach us that video games sucked.

This book probably makes it seem as if I hate myself and everything I do. I mostly just hate every person I've ever *been*
- Greg Gaines (CHARACTER), Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

But a movie doesn't have to be good if it has Hugh Jackman.

I'm smart in some ways- pretty good vocabulary, solid at math – but I am definitely the stupidest smart person there is… I was going to be the worst friend in the history of dying girls… Because I don't really have a moral compass and I need to rely on (Earl) for guidance, or else I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something. How fucked up is that.

I guess I was actually sort of grateful that someone else was taking over my life. I mean, I'm obviously pretty terrible at managing my own life, so it was nice to know that it was in good hands. But also it was nice to have all these concrete tasks to do and be sort of distracted and consumed by them. It kept me from thinking about every depressing and weird thing that was going on at that time.

Basically, my point is not that you listen to people to learn anything listening. You're doing it to be nice and make them like you, because everyone likes to talk.

Even if you do die, I was thinking today, it's really only on the arbitrary human scale that a human life seems fort, or long, or whatever, and like, from the perspective of eternal time, the human life is vanishingly small, like it's really equivalent whether you live to be 17 or 94 or even 20,00 years old, which is obviosusly impossible, and then, on the other hand, from the perspective of an ultra-nanoinstant, which is the smallest measurable unit of time, a human life is almost infinite even if you die when you're like, a toddler. So either way it doesn't even matter how long you live. So I don't know if that makes you feel better, but it's just something to think about.

Mitzvah" is Hebrew for "colossal pain in the ass.

But you gotta live your own life. You gotta take care a your own shit before you get started doing things for errybody else.

Mom was asking me to resume a friendship that had no honest foundation and ended on screamingly awkward terms. How do you do that? You can't.

This book probably makes it seem like I hate myself and everything I do. But that's not totally true. I mostly just hate every person I've ever been. I'm actually fine with myself right now.

I entered Excessive Modesty Mode. Nothing is stupider and more ineffective than Excessive Modesty Mode. It is a mode in which you show that you're modest by arguing with someone who is trying to compliment you. Essentially, you are going out of your way to try to convince someone that you're a jerk.

Maybe after you die you get sent to a giant room with archives of newspapers that have been written by these angel journalists specifically about your life and then you read them and they look like this. That would be insanely depressing. Hopefully at least some of her headlines would be about the other people in your life and not just you.

She had spent so much time listening to me that I guess she pretty much knew exactly how I felt about certain things, and you can't deny that it feels nice when someone knows you that well.

I don't want to sound condescending, so I'm not going to say anything else, except that it is literally impossible to imagine a thing dumber than sports.

There is no force on earth greater than the fear jocks have of homosexuals. None. It's like the Jewish fear of the Nazis, except the complete opposite with regard to who is beating the crap out of whom. So I guess it's more like the Nazi fear of the Jews.

Bon Iver: Way too emotionally high stakes for casual listening in the sense that it makes every single part of your life feel like the part of a TV show where you are in a hospital saying goodbye for the very last time

Greg, we all like weirdos.