Gary D. Schmidt

“OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.”

“You know one thing that Mr. Powell taught me? He taught me that sometimes, art can make you forget everything else all around you. That's what are can do.”

“We carry our childhood with us.”

“I almost cried. But I didn't, because if you're in seventh grade and you cry while wearing a blue floral cape and yellow tights with white feathers on the butt, you just have to curl up and die somewhere in a dark alley.”

“Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?""Sometimes I do," she said, and then smiled. "but sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.”

“Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.”

“He missed him like he would miss the sun if it fell out of the sky.”

“Would you have left a guy being beat up to go find a teacher?' I asked.My father, he wiped his hand across his face, and what was left behind was a smile.Really, a smile.'Not in a million years,' he said.”

“more to be a human being with”

“Whatever it means to be a friend, taking a black eye for someone has to be in it.”

“Mr. Ferris didn't say anything the whole time. He sat next to me and listened. And when I finished, I looked at him.He was crying. I'm not lying. He was crying.I don't think it was because how hard I hit him.I know how the Black-Backed Gull feels when he looks up into the sky.Maybe, somehow, Mr. Ferris does too.”

“I know. That sounds like a lie. But Presbyterians know that every so often a lie isn't all that bad, and I figured that this was about the best place it could happen.”

“It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.”

“Vengeance is sweet. Vengeance taken when the vengee isn't sure who the venger is, is sweeter still.”

“You can't just skip the boring parts.""Of course I can skip the boring parts.""How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?""I can tell.""Then you can't say you've read the whole play.""I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.”

“You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say?Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?”

“He felt it deep, like a stone too big to heft out of the garden. He just had to how around it and make do.”