AJ > AJ's Quotes

“In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can't Google.)”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“You think it's so easy to change yourself. You think it's so easy, but it's not. True, things don't stay the same forever: couches are replaced, boys leave, you discover a song, your body becomes forever scarred. And with each of these moments you change and change again, your true self spinning, shifting positions-- but always at last it returns to you, like a dancer on the floor. Because throughout it all, you are still, always, you: beautiful and bruised, known and unknowable. And isn't that - just you - enough.”
― Leila Sales, This Song Will Save Your Life

“No one know for certain how much impact they have on the lives of other people. Oftentimes, we have no clue.”
― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

“You have to pretend you get an endgame. You have to carry on like you will; otherwise, you can't carry on at all.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“A strange and baffling truth: that the people we're supposed to know best can turn out to be strangers, and that near strangers can feel so much like home.”
― Lauren Oliver, Replica

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“You are as real as anyone, and your doubts make you more real, not less.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“There are seven billion people in the world and you have only experienced twenty thousand at the most. And those twenty thousand were fairly homogenous. Your experiences with people have been largely dictated by your parents' choices. The neighborhood in which they chose to purchase a house. Where they sent you to school. And maybe those choices weren't the best for you. Maybe you don't fit in where you are now... There are seven billion other people out there. Seven billion. Are you really pessimistic enough to believe that you wouldn't get along with any of them?”
― Matthew Quick, Every Exquisite Thing

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I get it now. It's hard to let someone find you in all the dark and twisty places inside, but eventually, you have to hope that they do, because that's the beginning of everything.”
― Julia Walton, Words on Bathroom Walls

“Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.”
― Stephen King, Doctor Sleep

“I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“I realized pretty early on that the who didn’t really matter so much. That anybody who listens to me, I end up loving them just a little.”
― Courtney Summers, Sadie

“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“One had followed the rules, and one had not. But the problem with rules... was that they implied a right way and a wrong way to do things. When, in fact, most of the time they were simply ways, none of them quite wrong or quite right, and nothing to tell you for sure what side of the line you stood on.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“And they are beginning to realize that the world they live in is a place where the right thing is often hard, sometimes dangerous, and frequently unpopular.”
― Lois Lowry, Number the Stars

“Having a sister, mom says, is a place only the two of them will share, made of secrets they never have to say aloud - but if they did, it would be in a language only the two of them could speak. Having a sister is a promise no one but the two of you can make - and no one but the two of you can break.”
― Courtney Summers, The Project

“If you tell a story - something real, something true - you get to be alive in other people. And writing feels like the most... the greatest chance I'll ever have at being - alive.”
― Courtney Summers, The Project

“I'm discovering me out here, for the good and the bad. There's things I'm proud of and stuff I'd rather forget, but it all makes up who I am and what I was, and what I've got to work with if I want to become something else.”
― Mindy McGinnis, Be Not Far from Me

“...If I can't feel the good things anymore, then doing a few bad ones shouldn't hurt a bit.
And they are long overdue.”
― Mindy McGinnis, The Initial Insult

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“The thing about fic is that is comes from love. Characters you love so much, that you feel so deeply for, you'll watch them fall in love a thousand different ways, over and over.”
― Emma Mills, This Adventure Ends

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska