John David Anderson Quotes

wishes are made in moments of wonder and desperation. Wishes are prayers without a salutation and minus an amen.

I know what you are going to say: sticks, stones, and broken bones, but words can kick you in the gut. They wriggle underneath your skin and start to itch. They set their hooks into you and pull. Words accumulate like a cancer, and then they eat away at you until there is nothing left. And once they are let loose there really is no taking them back.

When adults tell you they are concerned about you,what they usually mean is that they think you are up to no good and are about to have you tested,or increase your medication.Or transfer you to military school.

A wish is many things. It is apprehension and anticipation. It is lucky coins and dandelion fluff and rainbows stretching to forever. It is loves-me after love-me-nots and a pile of plucked flower petals at your feet. It's purple bikes and getting picked first and a passing grade in math. It's the marvelous and the miraculous. It's hunger and heartache. A wish is something extraordinary that you never hoped to have.
Or something very ordinary that most people take for granted.

A beautiful mind is worth more then a pretty face

You have to slay the dragon to be the hero. Not easy to do, but at least you know what you're dealing with...

But there are no such things as dragons. It's never that clear-cut. Sometimes, the thing you're fighting against is hiding from you. It's tucked away, buried deep where you can't see it. In fact, for a long time, you might not even know it's there. Maybe when it starts, it's just this tiny thing you don't even notice. Maybe you mistake it for something else or you ignore it. But then it starts to grow, and before you know it, it's stalking you. Before you know it, it has you cornered...

Of course, sometimes it really is a dragon, or at least it's a monster, determined to destroy you or someone you care about from the inside out. And you know it's there. You just have no idea how to stop it.

In the past year alone, I've robbed banks. I've robbed people. I've robbed people standing outside banks.

I guess it happens to everyone. You get pushed off to the side, or you just learn to blend in, stay out of the way, merge with the crowd. And you start to think that maybe you're not the center of the universe anymore. Maybe you're not as awesome or creative or talented or worthy of attention as you originally thought.
But in your head, at least, you can still be all those things. You can be the hero at the center of it all. The man with the plan.
The one who leads the way.

It doesn't take much. A poem. A catch. A glance. A roll of the dice. And it doesn't matter what's true and what isn't. Doesn't matter what you think you know about yourself. The things you have the guts to tell people and the things you don't. You get your label, and then you get ignored, or sometimes you get teased, but mostly you go about your business, thinking things that you would never say out loud, not to someone's face.
But there are some words you know you can't say. Not out loud, not without getting into serious trouble. You might whisper them to your friends, but you would never write them down. Instead you find some other way. A secret code. An inside joke… And everyone knows what it means, but nobody says anything.

Words accumulate. And once they're free there's no taking them back.

You can do an awful lot of damage with a handful of words. Destroy a friendship. End a marriage. Start a war. Some words can break you to pieces.

But that's not all. Words can be beautiful. they can make you feel things you've never felt before. Gather enough of them and they can stick those same pieces back together, provided they're the right words, said at the right time. But that takes more courage than you'd think.

The deadliest snake in the world is the inland taipan, by the way. A single drop of its venom is enough to kill a hundred men. And yet, in the history of snakebites, this species of snake has only ever killed one person. I told that to Ms. Bixby at the end of that day, the day she broke the news. She asked me what the moral was. She's always asking me what I think the moral is, because she knows I sometimes don't get that part. But the moral of the inland taipan was easy:

Just because it can doesn't mean it will. Things are never as bad as they seem.

When you're a teenager,everybody is waiting for you to be something or somebody else-your friends,your parents,your teachers.Sometimes you lose track.

The nod is the easiest lie there is.

You find your people and you make your tribe and you protect each other from the wolves.

That's Jenna. She's one of those girls who talk just as much with her hands as with her mouth, which means between the three of them you don't get a word in. But she's a little restricted by the thick steel cuffs around her wrists, so right now she is just wriggling her fingers. Vigorously.

Dungeons & Dragons was like that. Forget that half the kids in school probably went around slaying dragons and stashing loot on their PlayStations or iPads. It's different when you actually have to roll the dice.

We all have moments when we think nobody sees us. When we feel like we have to act out or be somebody else to get noticed. But somebody notices, Topher. Somebody sees. Somebody out there probably thinks you're the greatest thing in the whole world. Don't ever think you're not good enough.

Because sometimes it's better to believe in the impossible. To believe you are a secret agent or a private detective or a superhero and not just a kid with freckled cheeks and gangly arms who is too clumsy to leap a tipped-over garbage can in a single bound.
Until you are lying in the middle of the sidewalk, with a throbbing ankle and bloody chin, wishing you hadn't even tried.

It makes you wonder where they all go, all the letters and notes, the thank-you cards and he birthday invitations, the little missives scrawled along the edges of grocery lists, the doodles on the cardboard backs of spiral-bound notebooks. All the messages, so important, so pressing, so necessary.
Maybe Wolf's right and they never really disappear. Even after they're crumpled and thrown away, they linger and become ghosts. Not the kind that hide up in the attic rattling your shutters, but the kind that follow you wherever you go, coming back to you like an echo, like when something leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I don't know if that's guilt or regret.

I haven't tried anything like this since the accident."
"I believe in you," I say. I mostly do.
"I'm just saying that there's a very small but not statistically insignificant chance that this care could explode."
"Mike!"
"Fine!

A wish is many things. It is hope and desire and daydreams. It is impossibility and improbability and something in between. It is stardust and well water and spectrums of light in the sky. It is half-melted birthday candles and Christmas lists. It is broken turkey bones, It is the willing suspension of disbelief.
And sometimes it is desperation. It is a hole in your heart that wants filling. It is more-than-anything-in-the-world.