Top 80 Gordon Korman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The dog always dies. Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down.”

— Gordon Korman

2. “What was so wrong about the old me that now I have to be somebody else?”

— Gordon Korman

3. “But a dead man doesn’t care what uniform he’s wearing.”

— Gordon Korman

4. “If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

— Gordon Korman

5. “When we lock things away,” he said with conviction, “we’re really imprisoning ourselves.”

— Gordon Korman

6. “If the cake fits, eat it!”

— Gordon Korman

7. “It’s like living your whole life without ever looking in a mirror, Amy thought, and suddenly you see your reflection, and you’re a monster.”

— Gordon Korman

8. “We don’t have to love it. We just have to steal it.”

— Gordon Korman

9. “In our family, you don’t get a childhood. We’re too busy trying to dominate the world.”

— Gordon Korman

10. “I hate France. It’s like the whole country’s on a diet.”

— Gordon Korman

11. “A paper chain can be done when it hits a certain number of links. But tolerance is a project you always have to keep working at.”

— Gordon Korman

12. “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, I’ll conk you with this pet carrier!”

— Gordon Korman

13. “This is an awful thing that’s happened to you, but it’s also presenting you with a rare opportunity. You have the chance to rebuild yourself from the ground up, to make a completely fresh start.”

— Gordon Korman

14. “Challenge isn’t going to come from any curriculum, no matter how hard they make it. It’s going to come from life.”

— Gordon Korman

15. “We can’t change the past. All we can do is work hard to make things right in the future.”

— Gordon Korman

16. “Be the Ambulance. Make toast.”

— Gordon Korman

17. “Justice and fairness aren’t just part of the social studies curriculum, you know. They’re the building blocks of our entire society.”

— Gordon Korman

18. “We all do jerky things,” she assures me. “It’s what you do next that matters.”

— Gordon Korman

19. “You don’t get Billie Joe Armstrong’s autograph on your forehead without following your instincts.”

— Gordon Korman

20. “GORDON KORMAN wrote his first book at age fourteen.”

— Gordon Korman

21. “They crested a rise, and there it was, in the hollow between rolling hills – a low, square building, ghostly gray in the moonlight. “Is that it?” asked Hamilton. “It probably isn’t the local opera house,” groaned Ian.”

— Gordon Korman

22. “My dad always uses this expression: “If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

— Gordon Korman

23. “I’ve been victimized but that doesn’t mean I have to be a victim.”

— Gordon Korman

24. “Yeah, Rubio,” snorts Bear. “If I had a face like yours, I’d appreciate anyone who could make me look good. So shut up.”

— Gordon Korman

25. “If it isn’t on YouTube, it might as well have never happened.”

— Gordon Korman

26. “Link, there hasn’t been time for me to give you much of a formal Jewish education. But you might remember from Sunday school some of the stories of the Old Testament. God forgives us – and by doing that, God shows us how to forgive each other. Even more important, those of us who’ve been forgiven spend the rest of our lives trying to be worthy of that forgiveness.”

— Gordon Korman

27. “And how much do I care about hurting their delicate feelings? Well, you could fit that inside the nucleus of a carbon atom.”

— Gordon Korman

28. “I’m not that happy about my triumphant return to football, and it isn’t only because of Dr. Nguyen, who would have signed a paper certifying I was pregnant with triplets if my father had paid him enough.”

— Gordon Korman

29. “Ask yourself: ‘Do I feel the need to laminate?’ Then teaching is for you.”

— Gordon Korman

30. “Our fans are great; our team is nifty! We’re going to get blown out by fifty!”

— Gordon Korman

31. “But here, two thousand miles from home, there was a real shipwreck, a real hope. A choice big enough to change our lives forever.”

— Gordon Korman

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32. “My father is considered the smartest man in the world. But when it comes to the unplugged life, I’m the brains of the family.”

— Gordon Korman

33. “I burst out with, “Aaron – Bear – ” The names are unfamiliar on my tongue, like I’ve never spoken them before.”

— Gordon Korman

34. “You didn’t argue with Griffin when there was a plan involved. In this town, Griffin Bing was The Man With The Plan.”

— Gordon Korman

35. “The thing about a cavity search is this: it has nothing to do with the dentist.”

— Gordon Korman

36. “They agreed it was wrong to throw the stick, but insisted that Chase couldn’t have predicted it would result in serious injury. Ha! The real reason was that Chase was the town sports hero – and the son of the last town sports hero. Chase’s dad had a lot of admirers on that board. And my family didn’t.”

— Gordon Korman

37. “You’re going to break your idiot neck one day, or someone’s going to break it for you.”

— Gordon Korman

38. “They don’t have regular time at school, you know. They have periods. All of a sudden an alarm goes off and you’re supposed to drop what you’re doing and rush off to a different room with a different teacher to do something completely different! How can anybody learn like that?”

— Gordon Korman

39. “The tradition at C Average was to nominate the biggest loser in the building.”

— Gordon Korman

40. “No fair! Those guys ripped off what we rightfully stole!”

— Gordon Korman

41. “I’m supposed to talk some sense into you,” she told me. “But what I really want to say is congratulations. You did the right thing.” “The police don’t think so.” “Typical,” she clucked. “Getting hung up on the numbers on your birth certificate when you probably saved a life.” “They made.”

— Gordon Korman

42. “For someone who’e smarter than a supercomputer, sometimes you’re a real idiot.”

— Gordon Korman

43. “Amy, since when do you have a boyfriend?”

— Gordon Korman

44. “Slime him, sis,” Dan urged, “Make him a redcoat.”

— Gordon Korman

45. “Ask me. I’m a cow expert.”

— Gordon Korman

46. “Just because you’ve got anger management problems doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty to be ticked off about.”

— Gordon Korman

47. “It’s taco night at Portland Street.”

— Gordon Korman

48. “Even the listings of school clubs only emphasized how self-centered we were. The track team – oh, you can’t run? Too bad. The art club – you’re all thumbs? Take a hike. The drama society – you’ve got stage fright? Tough buns. The chess club – no brains? No dice.”

— Gordon Korman

49. “It seems like cheating somehow, breaking some overarching Law of the Way Things Are Supposed to Be.”

— Gordon Korman

50. “Art theft gave a guy an appetite.”

— Gordon Korman