Jitterbug Quotes

“I can text in complete sentences. Oh, yeah, it’s a skill.” He smiled, proud of his accomplishments. “And, thanks to my mom being a competitive dancer as a teen, I know how to do the Lindy hop and the jitterbug.”
I sat bolt upright, and Akinli rolled his eyes.
“I swear, if you tell me you can jitterbug, I’m going to . . . I don’t even know. Set something on fire. No one can dance like that.”
I pursed my lips and dusted off my shoulder, a thing I’d seen Elizabeth do when she was bragging.
As if he was accepting a challenge, he shrugged off his backpack and stood, holding out a hand for me.
I took it and positioned myself in front of him as he shook his head, grinning.
“All right, we’ll take this slow. Five, six, seven, eight.”
In unison, we rock stepped and triple stepped, falling into the rhythm in our head. After a minute, he got brave and swung me around, lining me up for those peppy kicks I loved so much.
People walked by, pointing and laughing, but it was one of those moments when I knew we weren’t being mocked; we were being envied.
We stepped on each other’s toes more than once, and after he accidentally knocked his head into my shoulder, he threw his hands up.
“Unbelievable,” he said, almost as if he was complaining. “I can’t wait to tell my mom this. She’s gonna think I’m lying. All those years dancing in the kitchen thinking I was special, and then I run across a master.”
― Kiera Cass, The Siren

“Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.”
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

“I don’t want to make a big deal about this or anything, but I think it’s kind of cool how you do everything you do.”
I squinted at him.
“I mean, you use sign language, and it’s hard to communicate. But you’re into art and you can seriously cook and, for goodness’ sakes, you can even jitterbug. By the way, I told my mom, and she wants a video. Totally doesn’t believe me. But, yeah, I think it’s nice that you don’t let a little hitch in life slow you down. I admire that.”
I smiled. For a minute, I admired myself, too. He didn’t know how deep my problems ran, but he was right all the same. It was no small thing to try, to find out what you cared about in life. Even this moment, with this wonderful, temporary boy beside me, was a tiny miracle. I ought to give myself some credit.”
― Kiera Cass, The Siren

“--and that if you gave them a dance floor and a full band to fuel them, they could do more than dance: they could fly. ....They did it without wings.”
― Brendan Mathews, The World of Tomorrow