Top 60 Jesse Andrews Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It was time to ride the wave or drown in a sea of crazy.”

— Jesse Andrews

2. “It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad?”

— Jesse Andrews

3. “The best ideas are always the simplest.”

— Jesse Andrews

4. “If after reading this book you come to my home and brutally murder me, I do not blame you.”

— Jesse Andrews

5. “One thing I’ve learned about people is that the easiest way to get them to like you is to shut up and let them do the talking.”

— Jesse Andrews

6. “Have you ever noticed that people look like either rodents or birds? And you can classify them that way, like, I definitely have more of a rodent face, but you look like a penguin.”

— Jesse Andrews

7. “Well, Greg, I think that it just means that even after somebody dies, you can... you can still keep learning about them, you know, their life. It can keep unfolding itself to you just as long... just as long as you pay attention to it.”

— Jesse Andrews

8. “The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet.”

— Jesse Andrews

9. “He was especially excited about Aguirre, the Wrath of God. “Look at this crazy dude,” he yelled, point at Klaus Kinski, who on the cover is wearing a Viking helmet and looks like a psychopath. So – with Dad’s permission – we put the film in and watched it. This would turn out to be the single most important thing ever to happen in our lives.”

— Jesse Andrews

10. “So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks. Do you accept that premise? Of course you do. It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad?”

— Jesse Andrews

11. “Just because something is weird and hard to understand doesn’t mean it’s creative.”

— Jesse Andrews

12. “It’s like when a kitten tries to bite something to death. The kitten clearly has the cold-blooded murderous instinct of a predator, but at the same time, it’s this cute little kitten, and all you want to do is stuff it in a shoebox and shoot a video of it for grandmas to watch on YouTube.”

— Jesse Andrews

13. “You can’t fight Mom’s unstoppable move. It probably how Mom got to be boss of a nonprofit: Nonprofits are all about persuading people to do stuff by talking at them. It’s like Will Carruthers talking you into giving him your Doritos ‘one time,’ except that the nonprofit is going to jump you in the locker room and whip your naked buttocks with a towel.”

— Jesse Andrews

14. “If this were a video game, you could just break everything in this room and a bunch of money would come out of it, and you wouldn’t even have to pick it up, you would just walk into it and suddenly it would be in your bank account.”

— Jesse Andrews

15. “This book probably makes it seem like I hate myself and everything I do. But that’s not totally true. I mostly just hate every person I’ve ever been. I’m actually fine with myself right now.”

— Jesse Andrews

16. “Girls like good-looking guys, and I am not very good-looking. In fact, I sort of look like a pudding.”

— Jesse Andrews

17. “Earl and I actually didn’t have much in common with each other, either, but we were the only ten-year-olds in Pittsburgh who liked Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and that counted for something. It actually counted for a lot.”

— Jesse Andrews

18. “I am the Thomas Edison of conversational stupidity.”

— Jesse Andrews

19. “He was was especially excited about Aguirre, the Wrath of God. ‘Look at this crazy dude,’ he yelled, pointing at Klaus Kinski, who on the cover is wearing a Viking helmet and looks like a psychopath.”

— Jesse Andrews

20. “I just realized that you may not know what ‘fin’ means. It is a filmmaking term. Specifically, it is French for ‘This movie is over, which is good, because it probably confused the hell out of you, because it was made by French people.”

— Jesse Andrews

21. “He is pacing back and forth humming the theme from Rent or maybe cats.”

— Jesse Andrews

22. “If you’re not from Pittsburgh, I should probably explain that “yinzers” are people with heavy Pittsburgh accents. For example, instead of “you” or “y’all,” they say “yinz.” Another feature of yinzers is that they wear Steelers apparel at all times, including in the workplace and at weddings.”

— Jesse Andrews

23. “You cats mind if I make it a trio?′ he asked me, and it was not a huge surprise that a dude of his appearance was speaking in Jazz Voice.”

— Jesse Andrews

24. “Jazz camp was mostly dudes. It was just a scene of way too many dudes.”

— Jesse Andrews

25. “There’s a decent chance that I’m not even a human being.”

— Jesse Andrews

26. “The sentence should be: “I was pleasantly surprised when the first day of senior year did not make me want to freak out and hide in my own locker pretending to be dead.”

— Jesse Andrews

27. “Who else is there to lead the masses? The smart kids? Please. They have no interests in politics. They’re hoping simply to attract as little attention as possible until high school is over. Then they can escape to some college where no one will mock them for knowing how an adverb works.”

— Jesse Andrews

28. “I guess I was actually sort of grateful that someone else was taking over my life. I mean, I’m obviously pretty terrible at managing my own life, so it was nice to know that it was in good hands. But also it was nice to have all these concrete tasks to do and be sort of distracted and consumed by them. It kept me from thinking about every depressing and weird thing that was going on at that time.”

— Jesse Andrews

29. “Theory: People always get fired up when an unattractive girl an unattractive dude are dating each other.”

— Jesse Andrews

30. “You could have an eight-inch thick titanium diaper bolted to your pelvis, and you would still somehow get laid. It should be their official tourism slogan: Israel Where Virginity Goes to Die.”

— Jesse Andrews

31. “She was now using a voice that women usually reserve for cats.”

— Jesse Andrews

32. “It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucked.”

— Jesse Andrews

33. “I don’t want to sound condescending, so I’m not going to say anything else, except that it is literally impossible to imagine a thing dumber than sports.”

— Jesse Andrews

34. “You can’t wrap your head around not living. You can’t actually believe that you’re not gonna be alive.”

— Jesse Andrews

35. “Maybe after you die you get sent to a giant room with archives of newspapers that have been written by these angel journalists specifically about your life and then you read them and they look like this. That would be insanely depressing. Hopefully at least some of her headlines would be about the other people in your life and not just you.”

— Jesse Andrews

36. “I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something.”

— Jesse Andrews

37. “Basically, my point is not that you listen to people to learn anything listening. You’re doing it to be nice and make them like you, because everyone likes to talk.”

— Jesse Andrews

38. “No, you don’t have to live inside my head. For every, just, insanely stupid thing I do or say, there are like fifty even worse ones that I just barely avoid doing or saying, just out of dumb luck.”

— Jesse Andrews

39. “And if a jock. God forbid, witnesses you hobnobbing with theater kids, he will immediately assume you are gay, and there is no force on earth greater than the fear jocks have homosexuals. None. It’s like the Jewish fear of Nazis, except the complete opposite with regard to who is beating the crap out of whom. So I guess it’s more like the Nazi fear of Jews.”

— Jesse Andrews

40. “Mom has never allowed video games in the house, except for the educational kind, like Math Blaster, and that wasn’t so much to teach us that video games sucked.”

— Jesse Andrews

41. “Even after somebody dies, you can still keep learning about them.”

— Jesse Andrews

42. “The plot of the movie seemed stupid to them: Aguirre and everyone were searching for a city that it said right at the beginning did not exist. They didn’t understand that that was the whole point. They didn’t get that it was awesome because it was so insanely meaningless.”

— Jesse Andrews

43. “You can sort of tell that they are doing this to show everyone that they are good enough at music to just casually sit around reading sheet music.”

— Jesse Andrews

44. “No one seemed to know how my broken arm got infected. Pretty quickly I stopped asking questions about it. I was worried I would find out that there were other basic medical facts that nurses didn’t know; like where skin comes from, or how surgery works.”

— Jesse Andrews

45. “When girls see two Unattractives dating, they think, ‘Hey! Love is possible even for unattractive people. They have to love different things about each other than their physical appearances. That’s so sweet.’ Meanwhile, dudes see it and think, ‘That is one less guy I have to compete with for the most succulent boobs in the Boob Competition that is high school.”

— Jesse Andrews

46. “Bud, this is it,” Mr. McCarthy said. “This is the last year, and then you’re gone. Let me tell you this: After high school, life only gets better. You’re in a tunnel right now. There’s a light glimmering there at the end of it. You gotta make it to that light. High school is a nightmare, bud. It might be the worst years of your life.”

— Jesse Andrews

47. “Basically, being a senior means that when people throw things at your teeth, it’s accidental. In other words, being a senior is awesome.”

— Jesse Andrews

48. “The theater kids? My God, it would be a bloody massacre. They would be found beaten to death with their own dog-eared The Wiz songbooks.”

— Jesse Andrews

49. “I don’t know how to live a normal human life.”

— Jesse Andrews

50. “Cat Stevens is also the only other member of the family who enjoys eating the meats that Dad brings home from the Strip, although sometimes he expresses his enjoyment by barfing.”

— Jesse Andrews