Top 100 A.S. King Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Instead of replying with my usual open-your-mind speech, I send love to my mother. Mom, I love you even though you are a critical, unforgiving horror show. This casserole sucks, but I like the way you roasted the walnuts.”

— A.S. King

52. “On one hand, it’s nice on the other side. Secrets don’t exist. There’s nothing to ignore, and no destiny. On the other hand, the same thing is possible in life, if only we’d start paying attention to the right stuff.”

— A.S. King

53. “You’re not being dramatic. This hurts.”

— A.S. King

54. “My eyelids get heavy, and i feel an instant urge to make today disappear by falling asleep until it’s tomorrow. But i can’t move.”

— A.S. King

55. “I wish I could talk to twenty-three-year-old Sarah again. Ten-year-old Sarah doesn’t understand my struggle. She hasn’t come to this yet. She hasn’t come to the place where my present means nothing but my future is all everyone talks about. Twenty-three-year-old.”

— A.S. King

56. “The boys on the front had magazines with pinups, and they talked about how one day they would score women like that, but they’re kids. They don’t know what love is. Here they learn what hate is, and I am so sad that they might never know love because hate came first. Maybe they will miss out on having a woman like you, and I feel sorry for them.”

— A.S. King

57. “Somewhere in every mind is an opening to crawl through.”

— A.S. King

58. “But who’s to say what’s stupid and what’s not stupid when your life falls apart? Some people fall apart over TV shows. Some people fall apart over a breakup. Some people fall apart over someone eating the last bowl of Apple Jacks. I fell apart because of the annual art show. No one noticed I was falling apart before then. I.”

— A.S. King

59. “True love includes equal parts good and bad, but true loves sticks around and doesn’t run off to Vegas with a podiatrist.”

— A.S. King

60. “When I smile at you, I’m being sincere because I pity you. I pity anyone who says gimme. The world is going to be a giant disappointment for you. All you’ll ever get is the kindness of the Drive-Thru girl after growling your entitled order into my head. Gimme-gimme-gimme: the battle cry of millions of people every day. People who want.”

— A.S. King

61. “I have wrinkles. I am not tortured by them. I am no one special and so what if I have wrinkles? One day I will be no one special and be dead.”

— A.S. King

62. “You can’t change people with love. It doesn’t work that way.”

— A.S. King

63. “People pleasers make the best victims. I see it all the time at work.”

— A.S. King

64. “I love vocab. It’s like spelunking in a cave you’ve been in your whole life and discovering a thousand new tunnels.”

— A.S. King

65. “I don’t have enough gross words in my gross vocabulary to describe how gross that gross thought is. Gross.”

— A.S. King

66. “Blowing up isn’t always external. It’s not always easy to hear or see. Synapses fire every day in my brain. Thinking is just like exploding until it eventually scars you and you can’t interact with people anymore. It’s like one big, final detonation.”

— A.S. King

67. “We all had our collective heads in the oven.”

— A.S. King

68. “Well, if it’s as easy as catching my future from a blood relative, then I guess I’m due to be a drunk, pregnant, dropout stripper any day now.”

— A.S. King

69. “The hardest thing about talking about Trust, we learn for the third time, is that all of our minds go to lack of Trust because we feel we have experienced that more than Trust.”

— A.S. King

70. “I wish for world peace, because it’s about as likely to occur anything else I can wish for.”

— A.S. King

71. “I’m not sure I can be what they want me to be. But I’ll try.”

— A.S. King

72. “Friends act like friends.”

— A.S. King

73. “Suicide isn’t something people do to hurt other people. It’s something people do to release themselves from pain.”

— A.S. King

74. “Sarah. Sarah. Sarah. I can’t get away from myself.”

— A.S. King

75. “The bag is me. I can’t explain why the bag is me, but the bag is me. I have been swinging and I have come to a complete stop. I have no idea why. I have no idea why anything. Like, why I’m here. Or why I stopped. Or why I was swinging.”

— A.S. King

76. “No patience. No kisses. No hugs. Just a tweezers and some rubbing alcohol, and a stinging sensation that never goes away.”

— A.S. King

77. “I’m sixteen years old and this is the main idea the adults in my life have given me. Whether it’s seaweed in Mexico, missing art projects, or Dad shrugging, the message is clear: The older people get, the less they can do about things.”

— A.S. King

78. “I learned in English class about surrealists. It was the first time I wanted to throw myself up so I could be marked present. Surrealism turns the whole world upside down.”

— A.S. King

79. “Is it okay to lie in order to be happy?”

— A.S. King

80. “I see it as symbolic. The label no longer fits. His emotional parsimoniousness just got sucked away by the beautiful blue sky. I lean forward and reach my hand behind my back, then take my sign off, and I toss it out the window, too. I am no longer an ex-stripper’s daughter, either. I have gone from invisible Vera Dietz to invincible Vera Dietz.”

— A.S. King

81. “No. Frank Socrates doesn’t have conditions, because he’s dead. He loves me unconditionally.”

— A.S. King

82. “Never forget it. But stop living there. Live here, in the present. Think forward to your future.”

— A.S. King

83. “Did all outcasts come to this realization at a certain point in life? That being outcast from a bogus and pornographic society actually was a good thing? I hoped so. I hoped there was an army of us out there, smiling about it that very moment.”

— A.S. King

84. “I wished I could take her to the library and hand her over to the librarians. Please teach her about everything, I’d say.”

— A.S. King

85. “Everything was windswept and octagonal and finger-combed.”

— A.S. King

86. “Not living your life is just like killing yourself, only it takes longer.”

— A.S. King

87. “This is where the runaway train started down the track. I was inside the dining car enjoying a plate of cookies or something. I didn’t feel it then. But the train had been boarded on Saturday night when we drank the bat. And this was the beginning of its journey. Right here.”

— A.S. King

88. “I think back to the last thing Dave said to me and try to imagine what escaping oxygen would look like. It looks a lot like drowning.”

— A.S. King

89. “Graduation day means you must now do something with your life. You must grow up and buy your own train tickets, accrue student debt so you can become part of the machine. You must pick a major. The light comes only after that. Sorry about saying that graduation is the light at the end of the tunnel. That was a lie.”

— A.S. King

90. “She said, ‘This will be a time of asking questions and not rushing to answer them. A time of poking holes in your own theories. A time of thinking and not knowing.”

— A.S. King

91. “When there is no time, life is a treasure hunt. Even if the treasure is ugly or dirty or feels like grit in your eye. When there is no time, everything else matters.”

— A.S. King

92. “Nothing ever really happens.”

— A.S. King

93. “I used to love school until everybody got old enough to point and laugh.”

— A.S. King

94. “No one has proved to me that my husband isn’t still alive somewhere in Southeast Asia. So, as far as I’m concerned, if even one man is alive, we own him more than this – than presuming him dead for the sake of tidying paperwork.”

— A.S. King

95. “I picked up my camera and held it at arm’s length and took a picture of myself not caring. I called it: Glory Doesn’t Care.”

— A.S. King

96. “There is something megaical about the world at night. Sitting at the dining room table, sipping a glass of iced tea, I can totally understand why Dad gets up so early. Minutes seem to last longer when the rest of the world is asleep.”

— A.S. King

97. “Nature is so lucky. People can look at it and think nothing. No one analyzes it. No one blames it. No one underestimates it. Most people respect it. When we look at an ocean after an oil spill, we don’t smirk and say, “Well, look at this shithole you are now!” We pity it. We wish it hadn’t happened. We hope it gets better and that the fish who live there don’t die or grow babies who have two heads. Maybe if we all saw ourselves as nature, we’d be kinder.”

— A.S. King

98. “I took pictures of the people who thought they were my friends, but who I’d never let all the way in.”

— A.S. King

99. “It’s not just a passing comment or a racist quip in the hallway. My whole house is wallpapered with hate. My dinner is made with hate. My Christmas gifts are bought with hate. I started doing my own wash when I was ten just so my clothes can feel clean when everything else feels dirty.”

— A.S. King

100. “You are not your virginity. You are a human being.”

— A.S. King