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It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.

Laurie Halse Anderson

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Laurie Halse Anderson
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: October 23
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Laurie Beth Halse
Firsts
Skirts
First
Notebook
Seven
Morning
High
Hate
Speak
Notebooks
School
Skirt

More quotes by Laurie Halse Anderson

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When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know.
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I live in the borderlands. The word ghost sounds like memory. The word therapy means exorcism. My visions echo and multiplymultiply. I don't know how to figure out what they mean. I can't tell where they start or if they will end. But I know this. If they shrink my head any more, or float me away on an ocean of pills, I will never return.
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The trick to surviving an interrogation is patience. Don't offer up anything. Don't explain. Answer the question and only the question that is asked so you don't accidentally put your head in a noose.
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Nicole can do anything that involves a ball and whistle.
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Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. “Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
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I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy.
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Apologies mean nothing if you don't mean it.
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Emma hears me come up the stairs and asks me to watch a movie with her. I stick Band-Aids on my weeping cuts, put on pink pajamas so we match, and snuggle with her under her rainbow comforter. She arranges all of her stuffed animals around us in a circle, everyone facing the TV, then presses play...Ghosts dare not enter here.
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I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page
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They tied me back together, but they didn't use double knots. My insides are draining out of the fault lines in my skin, I can feel it, but every time I check the bandages, they're dry.
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Sometimes being an adult means doing the right thing, even if it's not what you want.
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Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.
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I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself.
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I handed my tools. The two of them reached down to help me out of the crater I'd dug. ''Isn't that a little deep?'' Yoda asked. ''It'll help the roots get established,'' I explained. ''Established where? China?
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Gym should be illegal. It's humiliating.
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There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.
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The constitution does not recognize different classes of citizenship based on time spent living in the country. I am a citizen, with the same rights as your son, or you. As a citizen, and as a student, I am protesting the tone of this lesson as racist, intolerant, and xenophobic.
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IT happened. There is no avoiding it, no forgetting. No running away, or flying, or burying, or hiding.
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He says a million things without saying a word. I have never heard a more eloquent silence.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.
Laurie Halse Anderson