Andrew Smith > Quotes

“Joey told me nothing ever goes back exactly the way it was, that things expand and contract- like breathing, but you could never fill your lungs up with the same air twice.”
― Andrew Smith, Winger

“And then it's always that one word that makes you so different and puts you outside the overlap of everyone else; and that word is so fucking big and loud, it's the only thing anyone ever hears when your name is spoken.

And whenever that happens to us, all the other words that make us the same disappear in its shadow.”
― Andrew Smith, Winger

“All good books are about everything, abbreviated.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Stupid people should never read books.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to decide not to decide, to remain confused and wide-eyed about the next thing that will pop up in the road you build.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Do you think I'm queer, Rob?" I asked.

"I don't care if you're queer," Robby said. "Queer is just a word. Like orange. I know who you are. There's no one word for that.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Worry and regret are both useless weights that provide no drag. They never did anything to slow down the planet for one goddamned second.”
― Andrew Smith, 100 Sideways Miles

“History provides a compelling argument that every scientist who tinkers around with unstoppable shit needs a reliable flamethrower.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Coffee is a girl who never tells a boy no.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“We made this stupid rule and this stupid rule.
Boys are not allowed to love each other.
Then we painted a bison on the wall.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“You must be crazy, after all, if a bird loves you.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“I thought about words - like words in books - and how just saying them made things real.”
― Andrew Smith, 100 Sideways Miles

“We killed this big hairy thing and that big hairy thing. And that was our day. You know what I mean.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“It was so pleasant, chaotic, emotionless, nameless-everything vibrating so beautifully in the universe without words.”
― Andrew Smith, 100 Sideways Miles

“History does show that boys who dance are far more likely to pass along their genes than boys who don't.

Boys who dance are genetic volcanoes.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Here is what the end of the world looks like:

It looks like a child running out into the road, eyes focused only on some destination ahead - the future, which is on the other side - and the child fails to notice the speeding truck that is there, on that same road, in the present.

This is what the end of the world looks like.

All roads cross here.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Well, if I'm going to get beat up for being queer, at least I'd like to know one time what it feels like to be kissed."

"Um. I guess you deserve that. You know. Everyone deserves to not feel alone.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Sometimes books imitate life. And sometimes books imitate lives that imitate books.”
― Andrew Smith, 100 Sideways Miles

“Okay, well . . . yeah, I didn’t really say “Shut the fuck up,” because I honestly don’t cuss. But I wanted to. I think, in reality, I raised my finger to my lips and said, “Shhhhh,” so she wouldn’t say anything else as we spiraled into the center of that wish circle.”
― Andrew Smith, Winger

“I was going to do something I'd never done, and see things I could not understand and never believed existed.

This is history, and it is also the truth.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“History does show that nothing means a hell of a lot more than nothing when teenagers talk. In this case, Robby knew it meant that I did not want to talk about it, so he left me alone.

Robby Brees was such a good friend.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Everyone on every road that crossed beneath the point of my pen was always going to do the same things over and over and over.

I was confused.

How could I be in love with a girl and a boy, at the same time?

I was trapped forever.

You know what I mean.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“The one sure thing about Marbury is that it’s a horrible place. But so is right here, too. And there’s certain benefit in the obviousness of its brutality, because in Marbury there’s no doubt about the nature of things: good and evil, or guilt and innocence, for example. Not like here, where you could be sitting in the park next to a doctor or someone and not have any idea what a sick and dangerous sonofabitch he really is. Because we always expect things to be proper, even if we haven’t learned our fucking lesson that it just doesn’t work out like that all the time.”
― Andrew Smith, The Marbury Lens

“It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric.
The music sounded better than anything I'd ever heard.
I had never been so happy in my life.
I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest.
I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“They were both so beautiful, and their sound, as we said them to each other above the music, made our chests fill up with something electric and buzzing, like love and magic.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“Henry believed that Marbury was a world out of balance. He needs to take a closer look at this one.”
― Andrew Smith, The Marbury Lens

“I am not the only one who sometimes thinks I came from the pages of a book my father wrote.

Maybe it’s like that for all boys of a certain —or uncertain— age: We feel as though there are no choices we’d made through all those miles and miles behind us that hadn’t been scripted by our fathers, and that our futures are only a matter of flipping the next page that was written ahead of us.

I am not the only one who’s ever been trapped inside a book.”
― Andrew Smith, 100 Sideways Miles

“You know, if they ever gave a Nobel Prize for avoiding work, every year some white guy in Iowa would get a million bucks and a trip to Sweden.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle

“You could never get everything in a book. Good books are always about everything.”
― Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle