Kendra > Kendra's Quotes

“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“Heroism must not be about the recognition of the savior but the elevation of the saved.”
― Steve Orlando

“It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The thing I realize is, that it's not what you take, it's what you leave.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh.
My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid
introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I
threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“Star people are rare.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“Heart and head are contrary historians.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“Why fit in when you're born to stand out?”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing" I walked in a gray world of nothing.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

“He stared at me. "She liked you, boy." The intensity of his voice and eyes made me blink.
"Yes," I said.
"She did it for you, you know."
"What?"
"Gave up her self, for a while there. She loved you that much. What an incredibly lucky kid you were."
I could not look at him. "I know."
He shook his head with a wistful sadness. "No, you don't. You can't know yet. Maybe someday..."
I knew he was tempted to say more. Probably to tell me how stupid I was, how cowardly, that I blew the best
chance I would ever have. But his smile returned, and his eyes were tender again, and nothing harsher
than cherry smoke came out of his mouth.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl