Top 350 Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “In the spring of fifth grade, the boob fairy arrived with her wand and smacked Cassie wicked hard.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

252. “The bathroom door swings open. Emma sees the blood painting my skin and the red rivers carved on my body. Emma sees the wet knife, silver and bone. The screams of my little sister shatter mirrors.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

253. “What if a king made bad laws; laws so unnatural that a country broke them by declaring its freedom?” He threw his arms in the air. “Now you are spouting nonsense. Two slaves running away from their rightful master is not the same as America wanting to be free of England. Not the same at all.” “How is it then that the British offer freedom to escaped slaves, but the Patriots don’t?”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

254. “Maybe I’ll be an artist if I grow up.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

255. “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

256. “The good soldier swears to kill. Fire the cannon, mount the barricade, lock and load. Smell your brother’s blood on your shirt. Wipe your sister’s brains off your face. Die, if you have to, so they’ll live. Kill to keep your people alive, live to kill some more.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

257. “Tell me this is a nightmare.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

258. “Light up the stars in your brain, electrify your body, buckle on your smile, and everybody will love you again.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

259. “It doesn’t matter where I go, I don’t want to be there. And then I get to the next place, and I don’t want to be there either.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

260. “She even tried to teach us the difference between active voice – “I snarfed the Oreos” – and passive voice – “The Oreos got snarfed.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

261. “You look like yourself. Nobody else. Trust me, that’s a good thing.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

262. “The winds of the desert have names. They feed on the bodies of broken children and rip out the beating hearts of men.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

263. “Love messes you up and makes you do strange things.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

264. “The stars folded themselves away as the sun peeked above the horizon and cracked open the sky and I kissed him and we laughed and it was good.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

265. “If I weren’t so tired, I’d shove trust and issue down the garbage disposal and let it run all day.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

266. “Halloween – the day when we could pretend to be whatever we wanted – seemed to be letting everyone be who they really were.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

267. “When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You’d be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside – walking through their days with no idea who they are.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

268. “Keep home in your heart, where no one can steal it.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

269. “The difference between forgetting something and not remembering it is big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

270. “Most life is spent doing things we don’t want to do.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

271. “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

272. “I am super proud of being an American, but we fail our veterans every day.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

273. “Kids are mostly very resilient.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

274. “Grandma frowned and yelled something in Russian. She could have been saying, ‘Open up, your best friend is here.’ On the other hand, it could have been, ‘America is a great country because of canned ravioli.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

275. “Maybe your son didn’t get that job because he’s not good enough. Or he’s lazy. Or the other guy was better than him, no matter what his skin color. I think the white people who have been here for two hundred years are the ones pulling down the country. They don’t know how to work – they’ve had it too easy.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

276. “I would never be popular. I didn’t want to be; I liked being shy. I’d never be the smartest or the hottest or the happiest. By eighth grade you start to figure out your limits.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

277. “I have ten bucks in my pocket – what to spend it on? French fries – ten dollars’ worth of french fries, ultimate fantasy.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

278. “Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battlefield in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

279. “A wide valley of the dead spread out below me, hundreds of them gently tucked into the ground in neat rows, their whispers frozen into the stones above them: I am here. I was here. Remember me. Remember.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

280. “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

281. “It wasn’t my fault. ANd I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

282. “It had been a good day, all things considered. I had managed rather well on my own. I opened Grandfather’s Bible. This is what it would be like when I had my own shop, or when I traveled abroad. I would always read before sleeping. One day, I’d be so rich I would have a library full of novel to choose from. But I would always end the evening with a Bible passage.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

283. “There is no safer. There’s not even safe, never has been.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

284. “On the morning of my Born Day, I thought my problems were over. That I’d grown from Changeling to Amazon. That I was ready to be a warrior. Instead, I lost everything. Everyone. I lost myself, too.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

285. “Does being forced to sit in time-out ever make little kids stop putting cats in the dishwasher or drawing on white walls with purple marker? Of course not. It teaches them to be sneaky and guarantees that when they get to high school they’ll love detention because it’s a great place to sleep.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

286. “Gracie’s father was an engineer, her mother an accountant. I couldn’t picture either one of them yelling or throwing things or having affairs. I could see my dad doing stuff like that. Trish sure did. But Dad carried a war in his skull, and Trish was a drunk. Gracie’s parents didn’t have anything like that to deal with, but their daughter was falling apart on the bathroom floor.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

287. “Out there on the edge, the spinning of the Earth had slowed to give us the time we need to start finding each other again.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

288. “But that’s the wrong question. Ask why everyone else is so pathetically stupid and why they’re always whining about detention, I should get a medal for not slapping people in the face every day.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

289. “I was the reason she didn’t run away freshman year. I was the reason she didn’t eat a bottle of sleeping pills when her boyfriend cheated on her. I listened for hours when her parents yelled and tried to stuff her into a mannequin shell that didn’t fit. I understood what triggered her earthquakes, most of them.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

290. “She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. “You’re lost!” “You’re angry!” “You’re in the wrong school!” “You’re in the wrong country!” “You’re on the wrong planet!”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

291. “When I was a real girl, my mother fed me her glass dreams one spoonful at a time. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Duke. Undergrad. Med school. Internship, residency, God. She’d brush my hair and braid it with long words, weaving the Latin roots and Greek branches into my head so memorizing anatomy would come easy.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

292. “David stares at Mr. Neck, looks at the flag for a minute, then picks up his books and walks out of the room. He says a million things without saying a word. I make a note to study David Petrakis. I have never heard a more eloquent silence.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

293. “No wonder the zombies were crazy. They thought they were supposed to practice breeding before they learned how to do their own laundry. They talked about it, thought about it, maybe did it, all while going through the motions of attending class and learning stuff so that they could go forth and become productive adults. Whatever that was supposed to mean.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

294. “My timing is perfect, and I wind up in a traffic jam. The cars around me are driven by fat cows and bellowing bulls. We roll along, six mph. I can run faster than this. We brake. They chew their cud and moo into their phones until the herd shifts gears and rolls forward again.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

295. “This is an uglynasty Momside. She bought a book about it. Tough love. Sour sugar. Barbed velvet. Silent talk.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

296. “My job is to nod or shake my head, to say “I know what you mean,” when I don’t, and “That is so unfair,” when it isn’t.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

297. “God crackles over the intercom and tells Mr. Freeman he’s late for a faculty meeting.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

298. “You never think about the mall being closed. It’s always supposed to be there, like milk in the refrigerator or God.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

299. “I would be lucky to get an invitation to my own funeral, with my reputation.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson

300. “You opened a debate. You can’t close if just because it is not going your way.” -David Petrakis.”

— Laurie Halse Anderson