Leah > Leah's Quotes

“Think of the sound you make when you let go after holding your breath for a very, very long time. Think of the gladdest sound you know: the sound of dawn on the first day of spring break, the sound of a bottle of Coke opening, the sound of a crowd cheering in your ears because you're coming down to the last part of a race--and you're ahead. Think of the sound of water over stones in a cold stream, and the sound of wind through green trees on a late May afternoon in Central Park. Think of the sound of a bus coming into the station carrying someone you love.
Then put all those together.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“When gods die, they die hard. It's not like they fade away, or grow old, or fall asleep. They die in fire and pain, and when they come out of you, they leave your guts burned. It hurts more than anything you can talk about. And maybe worst of all is, you're not sure if there will ever be another god to fill their place. Or if you'd ever want another god to fill their place. You don't want the fire to go out inside you twice.”
― Gary Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“Whatever it means to be a friend, taking a black eye for someone has to be in it.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“Maybe the first time that you know you really care about something is when you think about it not being there,and when you know-you really know-that the emptinessis as much as inside you as outside you.For it falls out,that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it;but being lacked and lost,why,then we rack the value,then we find the virtue that possesion would not show us while it was ours.That's when I knew for the first time that I really did love my sister.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“I think something must happen to you when you get into eight grade. Like the Doug Swieteck's Brother Gene switches on and you become a jerk.
Which may have been Hamlet, Prince of Denmark's problem, who, besides having a name that makes him sound like a breakfast special at Sunnyside Morning Restaurant--something between a ham slice and a three-egg omelet--didn't have the smarts to figure out that when someone takes the trouble to come back from beyond the grave to tell you that he's been murdered, it's probably behooveful to pay attention--which is the adjectival form.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“I saw my town as if I had just arrived. It was as if I was waking up. You see houses and buildings every day, and you walk by them on your way to something else, and you hardly see. You hardly notice they're even there, mostly because there's something else going on right in front of your face, But when the town itself becomes the thing that is going on right in front of your face, it all changes, and you're not just looking at a house, but at what's happened in that house before you were born.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“She came over and looked at the picture. Then she took my hand.
You know what that feels like?
Like what the astronauts will feel when they step onto the moon for the very first time.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now

“I love the sound of a brand-new bottle of coke when you pry the lid off and it starts to fizz. Whenever I hear that sound, I think of roses, and of sitting together with someone you care about and of Romeo and Juliet waking up somewhere and saying to each other, weren't we jerks? And then having all that be over. That's what I think of when I hear the sound of a brand-new bottle of Coke being opened”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“Did you find yourself?"

"What?" said my sister.

"Did you find yourself?"

"She found me," I said.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“Sometimes--and I know it doesn't last for anything more than a second--sometimes there can be perfect understanding between two people who can't stand each other. He smiled, and I smiled, and we put the Timex watches on, and we watched the seconds flit by.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now

“I never knew a building could hold so much inside.
. . . I saw my town as if I had just arrived. It was as if I was waking up. You see houses and buildings every day, and you walk by them on your way to something else, and you hardly see. You hardly notice they're even there, mostly because there's something else going on right in front of your face. But when the town itself becomes the thing that is going on right in front of your face, it all changes, and you're not just looking at a house but at what's happened in that house before you were born.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now

“And it really doesn't matter if we're under our desks with our hands over our heads or not, does it?

No, said Mrs. Baker. It doesn't really matter.

So, why are we practicing?

She thought for a minute. Because it gives comfort, she said. People like to think that if they're prepared then nothing bad can really happen. And perhaps we practice because we feel as if there's nothing else we can do because sometimes it feels as if life is governed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“...and she ran out of the diesel combustion and right to me and we held each other and we were not empty at all.

"Holling," she said. "I was so afraid I wouldn't find you."

"I was standing right here, Heather." I said. "I'll always be standing right here.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“I think he became a man who brought peace and wisdom to hi world, because he knew about war and folly. I think that he loved greatly, because he had seen what lost love is. And I think he came to know, too, that he was loved greatly." She looked at the strawberry in her hands. "But I thought you didn't want me to tell you your future.”
― Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars

“Kim was, as always, utterly happy while running, in accord with nature, in harmony with the universe, in touch with the truth that was in him, full of love for all creatures even to the lowliest insect.”
― Susan Trott, The Holy Man

“(Speaking about ponies engaging in a game of running around and chasing a ball with "imaginary riders")

Along with everything else about it, it seemed to be a parable for life. Going forwards and backwards and round in circles, striving ever forward only to have to run like crazy backwards to get the ball again, realizing that your enemy is after the same goal and you're actually helping him toward it and getting roughed up and possibly killed while you're at it but still feeling the comradeship of being in the game all together.”
― Susan Trott, The Holy Man

“We are born, we suffer, we die. However, love is a possibility for us all and, for some few, there is also a big house."

Daniel could not resist asking, because he really wanted to know. "Need they be mutually exclusive? Can't we have both love and house?"

Joe smiled. "Certainly. But one must consider carefully how one goes about getting the house.”
― Susan Trott, The Holy Man

“Nothing lasts. Everything changes. But the changes are the same. Winter will always turn to spring.”
― Susan Trott, The Holy Man

“To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive...After all these procedures the unbreachable mysteriousness of music remains intact. The book can never be more than an interruption. Afterward, the listening begins again, to generate, in turn, other and completely different books.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox

“The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“Sound is the most absorbent medium of all, soaking up histories and philosophical systems and physical surroundings and encoding them in something so slight as a single vocal quaver or icy harpsichord interjection.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“Yet the laboriously sought musical epiphany rarely compares to the unsought, even unwanted tune whose ambush is violent and sudden: the song the cab driver was tuned to, the song rumbling from the speaker wedged against the fire-escape railing, the song tingling from the transistor on the beach blanket. To locate those songs again can become, with age, something like a religious quest, as suggested by the frequent use of the phrase "Holy Grail" to describe hard-to-find tracks. The collector is haunted by the knowledge that somewhere on the planet an intact chunk of his past still exists, uncorrupted by time or circumstance.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“Scattered among these things are reminders that sound once existed: a metronome, a drumming pad, a guitar pick, a trumpet mouthpiece, a music stand, a tuning fork, a block of rosin...The older instruments bear the marks of those who have already played them, the scuffs and bites and dents that are the mysterious scars of sound. In their midst the house hangs, tenuous and enveloping, a sounding board waiting to be struck.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter--extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone--beauty is born.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself, not dead but present, so present that he overwhelms the well-ordered precincts of the living room. The sound sprawls. What vibrates here has more life than any room.”
― Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

“Hawkins was eloquent and poetic--but most of all he was exquisitely sensitive to a woman's moods. He sensed it when Annie was depressed, though she never told him she was, and he would say just the right thing to cheer her. And when she was elated, he nourished her elation, and kept it alive for weeks instead of fleeting minutes.
--"Out, Brief Candle”
― Kurt Vonnegut, While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

“I hear he liked flowers pretty well."
"Yes," said Annie, "he said they were the friends who always came back and never disappointed him."
--"Out, Brief Candle”
― Kurt Vonnegut, While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

“Q: What is wrong with the world?
A: Everybody pays attention to pictures of things. Nobody pays attention to things themselves.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction