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I stand in the center aisle of the auditorium, a wounded zebra in a National Geographic special, looking for someone, anyone to sit next to. A predator approaches: gray jock buzz cut, whistle around a neck thicker than his head. Probably a social studies teacher, hired to coach a blood sport.

Laurie Halse Anderson

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Laurie Halse Anderson
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: October 23
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Laurie Beth Halse
Social
Stand
Coaches
Hired
Jock
Next
Probably
Sport
Approaches
Thicker
Someone
Study
Center
Neck
Geographic
Around
Special
National
Studies
Jocks
Head
Approach
Wounded
Whistle
Auditorium
Sports
Cutting
Coach
Predator
Zebra
Looking
Teacher
Necks
Aisle
Auditoriums
Anyone
Blood
Gray
Buzz
Zebras

More quotes by Laurie Halse Anderson

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You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.
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Having a friend made everything else suck less.
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Gossip is the foul smell from the Devil's backside.
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He says a million things without saying a word. I have never heard a more eloquent silence.
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I make it through the first two weeks of school without a nuclear meltdown.
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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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I’m the girl who trips on the dance floor and can’t find her way to the exit. All eyes on me.
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Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls
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Nicole can do anything that involves a ball and whistle.
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You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beat- ing heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.
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I lift my arm out of the water. It's a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can't see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.
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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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I don’t know what I’m doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I’ll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I’ll think about a career path.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight.
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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 have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don't have anyone to sit with.
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.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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This is not our fight', the old man said. 'British or American, that is not the choice. You must choose your own side, find your road through the valley of darkness that will lead you to the river Jordan. . . Look hard for your river Jordan, my child. You'll find it.
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My first class is biology. I can't find it and get my first demerit for wandering the hall. It is 8:50 in the morning. Only 699 days and 7 class periods until graduation.
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My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can't decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into a monarch butterfly. I call her Hairwoman.
Laurie Halse Anderson