Quote

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

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Laurie Halse Anderson
Age: 62
Born: 1961
Born: October 23
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Laurie Beth Halse
Concrete
Burn
Holding
Breathe
Stitches
Deep
Snap
Inside
Snaps
Running
Pour
Together
Cheap

More quotes by Laurie Halse Anderson

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I needed to hear the world but didn't want the world to know I was listening.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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I want to tell him that it's just a stupid car, but bits of me are scattered all over town the graveyard, school, Cassie's room, the motel, and standing in from of the sink in my mother's kitchen. It takes too much energy to gather all the bits together, so I just sit there and watch him implode.
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.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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I won the wintergirl trip over the border into dangerland.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!
Laurie Halse Anderson
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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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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.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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I knit the afternoon away. I knit reasons for Elijah to come back. I knit apologies for Emma. I knit angry knots and slipped stitches for every mistake I ever made, and I knit wet, swollen stitches that look awful. I knit the sun down.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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We're good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in the eyes, we tend to drop the ball - at a time they most need a loving consistent community of adults, be it parents, aunts, uncles, or others.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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I shake my head. I pick up the rake and start making the dead-leaf pile neater. A blister pops and stains the rake handle like a tear. Dad nods and walks to the Jeep, keys jangling in his fingers. A mockingbird lands on a low oak branch and scolds me. I rake the leaves out of my throat. Me: Can you buy some seeds? Flower seeds?
Laurie Halse Anderson
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I scared myself, because once you've thought long and hard enough about doing something that is colossally stupid, you feel like you've actually done it, and then you're never quite sure what your limits are.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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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.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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Mr. Freeman sighs. No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you!
Laurie Halse Anderson
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Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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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.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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If I ever form a clan, we'll be the anti-cheerleaders and walk under the bleacher forming mild acts of mayhem.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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I sit at a table close to his desk. Ivy is in this class. She sits by the door. I keep staring at her, trying to make her look at me. That happens in movies - people can feel it when oother people stare at them and they just have to turn around and say something. Either Ivy has a great force field, or my lazer vision isn't very strong.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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Why not draw naked guys, just to be fair? Naked women is art, naked guys a no-no, I bet. Probably because most painters are men.
Laurie Halse Anderson
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You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl.
Laurie Halse Anderson