Quotes by American Authors - Page 246

One would think, however, that sharing a name might offer a thin string of connection. It was always a thrill to meet someone who had the same name as you, and unlike a lot of things, this was a thrill that never quite faded.
Pam Jones
You're a beautiful and wonderful and sensual and strong golden fawn, she says, followed by That was supposed to say "my best friend," but my phone...
Emily Henry
Don't you have something teenagery to do -- rage against authority, roll your eyes, mooch off your parents?
Kay Honeyman
(From the Q&A with the author at the end of the book.)Have any readers ever asked questions that shocked you?I have gotten one question repeatedly from young men. These are guys who liked the book, but they are honestly confused. They ask me why Melinda was so upset about being raped.The first dozen times I heard this, I was horrified. But I heard it over and over again. I realized that many young men are not being taught the impact that sexual assault has on a woman. They are inundated by sexual imagery in the media, and often come to the (incorrect) conclusion that having sex is not a big deal. This, no doubt, is why the number of sexual assaults is so high.I am also shocked by adults who feel that rape is an inappropriate topic to discuss with teenagers. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 44 percent of rape victims are under the age of 18 and 46 percent of those victims are between the ages of 12-15. It makes adults uncomfortable to acknowledge this, but our inability to speak clearly and openly about sexual issues endangers our children. It is immoral not to discuss this with them.
Laurie Halse Anderson
I knew," he murmurs. I can hear him over the music only because he says it right in my ear. "Right after we talked in the mall, I knew.""Knew what?""That you were going to be the first girl to break my heart."My breath catches. I force the smile now. "I haven't broken anything yet, right?""You will. Someday. But everybody breaks everything. For now we're fantastic. It's just, the better we get, the harder I realize the fall will be.
Michelle Painchaud
There's not such thing as handsome princes, she told herself.There's no such thing as happily ever after.She looked up at Park. Into his golden green eyes.You saved my life, she tried to tell him.Not forever, not for good. Probably just temporarily. But you saved my life, and now I'm yours. The me that's right now is yours. Always.
Rainbow Rowell
It's going to be okay," Park said.She nodded. "Right.""Because I love you."She laughed. "Is that why?""It is, actually.
Rainbow Rowell
Teachers need to sit with their journal and write in the voice of that teenager. Write and remember. That’s who we teach!
Penny Kittle
To now is to love, to see is a joy, but to lose is hurtful.
Rubye Armorer
If a society is to preserve stability and a degree of continuity, it must learn how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.
Eric Hoffer
I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
We leave such a trail of bodies through our teens and twenties that it's hard to tell which one is us. How many versions do we abandon over the years
Dan Chaon
Homeschool doesn’t give you a get out of teenage jail free card. It justgives you fewer opportunities to become the butt of someone’s lame Facebook joke.
Kim Culbertson
Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
Marisha Pessl
Before she closed the door, she hit me with this one: "I feel like it's November first," she said, "and I'm that discarded jack-o'-lantern whose heart and guts are splattered all over the boulevard of broken promises.""And a good night to you, too," I said.
Rick Detorie
This is followed by laughter because we're in high school, which means we're predictable and almost everything is funny, especially if it's someone else's public humiliation.
Jennifer Niven
Why does she always seem to think you drive like we're holding up a bank?"Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes, "Because that's what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements.
Brenna Yovanoff
Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know we’re rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks we’re so ready for our rebellious phase we can’t help but feel it’s safe, contained. It will turn out all right, despite the risk, snug in the shell of rebellion narrative. Rebellion narrative, does that make sense? It was appropriate to do, so we did it.
Daniel Handler
...real teenage boys aren't like characters in the books you read. They smell funny and are obsessed with video games and say dumb things. They're still learning, just like you.
Stacey Jay
Let your inner DORK shine through.
Rachel Renée Russell
Sometimes I wish I could just be like everyone else my age and not think at all.
Julia Karr
After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that's how I live now.
Meg Rosoff
I hated high school. I don’t trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there’s something wrong with you.
Stephen King
Juno MacGuff: I don't know what kind of girl I am.
Diablo Cody
For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength. Neither do they know reason or restraint, and if you want to know the truth, a goodly number of grown-up hearts never learn it.
Catherynne M. Valente
Juno MacGuff: Nah... I mean, I'm already pregnant, so what other kind of shenanigans could I get into?
Diablo Cody
A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.
Kelly Link
As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
Fran Lebowitz
People say teenagers think they're immortal, and I agree with that. But I think there's a difference between thinking you're immortal and knowing you can survive. Thinking you're immortal leads to arrogance, thinking you deserve the best. Surviving means having the worst thrown at you and being able to continue on despite that. It means striving for what you want most, even when it seems our of your reach, even when everything is working against you.
Francesca Zappia
The boys and girls in the clique. The awful names that they stick. You're never gonna fit in much kid, but it you're troubled and hurt, what you've got under your shirt will make them pay for the things that they did!
Gerard Way
Teenagers. Everything is so apocalyptic.
Kami Garcia
When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
John Green
the black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated.
Darnell Lamont Walker
Prisons are built to break men, and when men are broken society has consummated its revenge
Jan Valtin
You’re scaring the dog,” Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that inprisoner of war camps, I’ve heard. Depersonalization.
Garth Stein
In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise.
Jack Kerouac
We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn't make us safer.
Piper Kerman
Put 'em who threaten possessions and power together with 'em who offend our tastes in sex and dope. Those who're touched, put 'em in asylums. Pack off old ones to 'senior communities,' nursing homes. Our children? Keep'em prisoner, baby-sitter as warden. School? Good for fifteen to twenty years. Army afterward. Liberated, we live in prison. No this, no that. Kill us before we die!
John Cage
They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.
Ursula K Le Guin
The damn vermin are so numerous that I am afraid to sneeze, for fear the damned lice would regard it as gong for dinner, and eat me up - Robert Cobb Kennedy
Tobin T. Buhk
I am afraid the greatest prison that people live in is the fear what other people think... Grow up & lose the fear.
Ziad K. Abdelnour
I want to release my soul from its prison cell, to silence the guards who tell me that I am not capable of living. Every voice that ever told me that I cannot achieve has, at this moment, become silenced. This cell is no longer my home.
Leigh Hershkovich
I mean, what is prison, really, except a good bar without the liquor?
John Waters
Brightlord Adolin insisted. So long as you were in here, he wouldn't leave. We tried to stop him, but the man’s a prince. We can’t storming make him do anything, not even leave. He locked himself away in the cell and we just had to live with it.
Brandon Sanderson
I like visiting people in prison. I can say whatever I want to them, and they can’t do anything about it.
Brandon Sanderson
The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.
Richard Price
When you are born into bondage you can't see the prison.
Bryant McGill
Golden bars make no less a prisonthan a coffin on a hill.And in caged reformation,one wanders aimless still.The rafters now a recollectionof sacred suppression.How the morning dawnstrikes mourning confession.Now Death yields a harvestof the living masses.We walk toward its pathno earthly power surpasses.
Craig Froman
When a friend of mine boasted about living in a gated community, I thought he meant Folsom, and I wondered whether he knew Charles Manson.
Ron Brackin
When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can't help getting a little dirty yourself.
Stephen King
Great institutions have leaders who are proud of what they do, and who engage with everyone who makes up those institutions, so each person understands their role. But our jailers are generally granted near-total anonymity, like the cartoon executioner who wears a hood to conceal his identity. What is the point, what is the reason, to lock people away for years, when it seems to mean so very little, even to the jailers who hold the key? How can a prisoner understand their punishment to have been worthwhile to anyone, when it's dealt in a way so offhand and indifferent?
Piper Kerman
I know a little bit about trying to do the right thing and fucking up completely." I added."You talking about mom?" Ben said"I was talking about me.""You could have been talking about all of us. Ben pressed his hand against the glass and my brother and I matched palms.
Gillian Flynn
All the studies and all the research in the field of criminology affirm that prison education is the least expensive and most effective solution to overcrowding and strain on the budget caused by recevidism.
Christopher Zoukis
There is a tremendous amount of farting in prison.
Charlie Engle
Whattaya mean you ain’t no criminal lawyer? You a lawyer right? And you in here, that means you also a criminal.
Kenneth Eade
You have to remember, William. It may make the difference between freedom and half a lifetime in prison.
Kenneth Eade
That’s the ironic thing about time, Doc. One the one hand, we don’t have much of it for this, but it’s all I have in here.
Kenneth Eade
You did it! You are free!!!!!!!!
Paige Garland
Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.
Marlon James
Don't promote yourself as a country of constitutionality and compassion if you honestly believe that putting people in prison and treating them like animals is justified. Stop all the hype that we live in a free and democratic society. I used to ramble on about the same stuff. But now—are we really a country that believes in fairness and compassion? Are we really a country that treats people fairly? I've met good men—yes, good men—in prison who made mistakes out of stupidity or ignorance, greed, or just bad judgment, but they did not need to be sent to prison to be punished; eighteen months for catching too many fish; two years for inflating income on a mortgage application; three months for selling a whale's tooth on eBay; fifteen years for a first-time nonviolent drug conspiracy in which no drugs were found or seized. There are thousands of people like these in our prisons today, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars when these individuals could be punished in smarter, alternative ways. Our courts are overpunishing decent people who make mistakes, and our prisons have no rewards or incentives for good behavior. In this alone criminal justice and prison systems contradict their own mission statements (244).
Bernard B. Kerik