Margo Rabb > Quotes

“All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“I think sometimes the biggest influence isn't what's present in your life, but what's absent.

Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Grief isn't like a map you can follow. It's not a simple route with a destination. Sometimes you loop back and find yourself in the exact same place you left.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Every poem is a love poem, my dad had said. I'd always thought he meant romantic love...but there were so many kinds of great love: mother and daughter love. Father love. Best friend love. Aunt love. Mother's best friend love. Friendish friendesque love. Love for the living and love for the dead. Love for who you really are, for those weird parts of yourself that only a few people understand. Love for things you yearn to do, for putting words in a page. Love for traveling, for people and seeing new ways to live. Love for the world...”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“There's a thing in poetry called the caesura a pause between words, a silence. I thought: that's what real friendship is, too. Someone you can be quiet with. Someone who understands your mistakes and forgives you.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Love is never easy or guaranteed. Real love is a leap, you know. As you get older, you learn how hard it is, how hard everything is, how we never know if there's ground beneath our feet, or if we'll be hurt or heartbroken. But we leap anyway. You have to take that leap.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Don't search for answers. I felt like I was always searching. Literally -- when I felt depressed I'd wander online, pressing links, looking for something that would make me feel better. I'd surf from friends' photos to strangers' blog posts about how to apply makeup, to the flight message board, to Googling Will for the hundredth time--and feel worse.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Lightning could strike twice, three times, or ten. When you're on the wrong side of the odds, the odds are meaningless. They don't protect you or give you comfort.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“If grief had a permanence, then didn't also love?”
― Margo Rabb, Cures for Heartbreak

“They didn't believe me," I told Jack. "What kind of evidence do you and the police need? The killer to stick a knife in someone's neck in front of you and say, I'm committing murder right now-please video record this so there's evidence, and make sure to focus the camera on my face!”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“He arrives carrying a forest, and you said he walks his cat on a leash, and he's the one assessing other people's mental health?”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“I thought back to when I'd first stepped in Mimsy's garden and time has stopped, and I felt that strange joy. A crack in the universe. A shift in reality. I felt that now, too, like someone had performed surgery on my soul and tucked this strange new thing deep inside me: this knowledge of the world and what mattered in it. How there were places where you could go to escape the dark, terrifying world, at least for a little while. How beautiful things-small beautiful things-food and plants and flowers-how they could change you. That food wasn't about numbers and calories and nutrition, but beauty. That these beautiful things could be a key to unlocking a world inside you, a place that you couldn't before reach.
It could be protection, an armor, a way to survive the darkness. A way to walk through the world when you wanted to hide in bed all day and night.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“My dad used to say that giving someone a poem is like gifting them a feeling. Everything will change from black and white into color.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Edith’s mother used to say, ‘An immaculate home is a sign of a misspent life.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize: A Bank Street Best Book – A Whimsical YA Mystery in Manhattan

“Lucy's Rules for Living
1. Life is strange and messy and you are strange and messy. Strange and messy is beautiful.
2. We all stand on a precipice. Choose.
3. You'll always find your way home.
4. There are no rules. And if you think there are any, break them.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“Well, look at the relationships I've had which ended. Losing Clifford. Those stories could seem like tragedies, depending where they stopped. If you wanted to finish the story when I was sixteen or twenty or even last year, having given him up and never found him, then it would have a different ending. I'd made too many mistakes. I'd screwed up. Or I thought maybe the problem was me, something was wrong with me."
Something was wrong with me. that was how I'd felt since Nana died: that I'd done something wrong, screwed everything up, and that was the real reason why I didn't have a home, a permanent place where I belonged, and why I'd felt so lost since she died-all my flaws and mistakes.
She paused. "Now, taking the long view, even after what happened these past few weeks, I'm optimistic, I think all those things were sort of rough turns along the way, detours to get here. Where I am now. I know there will be a good ending.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“I love traveling, because your escaping into life instead of hiding from it.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“I love traveling, because you're escaping into life instead of hiding from it.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“In his writing, capitals popped up in his sentences like lost gophers.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“This was a crush? It felt like gum stuck in my throat. Gum stuck in my heart. Mucking everything up. Crush. It felt crushing. Not in a good way. In an eating-too-much cookie-dough-and-getting-a-stomachache way. Too overwhelming.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“I’m not something you fix like a broken plate or revise like a term paper. I’m a person. You love a person by accepting who they are, not constantly fixing them or trying to shape or change or teach them.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize: A Bank Street Best Book – A Whimsical YA Mystery in Manhattan

“All the cells in my body seemed to race and freeze at the same time.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“I took that leap, and I was flying”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“Clifford, I was just saying how there aren't good words for family, for step-half-siblings? How complex family is," Liliana said in her fragile voice.
"That's true," Clifford said. "Complicated. Messy. Endless fun." He smiled slightly and looked around the room with an expression I liked-as if the world was enormously absurd, and he sort of enjoyed it and hated it at the same time.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“Mimsy stood up and hugged her. "I thought we needed a Sea Change Day."
Edith squeezed Mimsy's hand and exhaled. "We do."
"A what?" I asked.
"It's a thing since we were teenagers," Mimsy said. "It's from one of Edith's favorite authors, M. F. K. Fisher. She started publishing books in the 1930s, and she wrote about ocean crossings to Europe-sea changes-and how your soul changes when you cross the sea. And she wrote about food and love."
If Edith and Mimsy wrote their own self-help book, it would be called: How to Stay Sane and Happy in a Dark, Dark World.
Our tea arrived, and Edith sipped hers slowly. "A Sea Change Day is when you say 'screw it' to everything that's expected of you, everything you're supposed to do. It's a way to turn around a ble day. A low day. To take a break and explore. Have dessert for lunch. Eat something beautiful.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“Stories can seem like tragedies, depending where they stopped.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize: A Bank Street Best Book – A Whimsical YA Mystery in Manhattan

“I'm not something you fix like a broken plate or revise like a term paper. I'm a person. You love a person by accepting who they are, not constantly fixing them or trying to shape or change or teach them.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize

“sometimes the biggest influence isn't what's present in your life, but what's absent. Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.”
― Margo Rabb, Kissing in America

“It’s about who I am right now. That I have value and worth as a person just being who I am. I don’t have to do things or achieve something for approval, for love. For you to love me.”
― Margo Rabb, Lucy Clark Will Not Apologize: A Bank Street Best Book – A Whimsical YA Mystery in Manhattan