Top 35 Matthew Tobin Anderson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

2. “Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

3. “Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

4. “My idea of life, it’s what happens when they’re rolling the credits.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

5. “I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

6. “I can’t tell you how irritating it is to be an atheist in a haunted house.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

7. “At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

8. “I could see my face, crying, in her blank eye.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

9. “There’s an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we’re all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there’s nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

10. “Certain elements of teen life that, 10 years ago, were very important to me still, are becoming less so as I get older. I mean, Ive kinda gotten over, I guess Im saying, the fact that I had trouble getting a date for the prom.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

11. “And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

12. “You need the noise of your friends in space.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

13. “There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don’t care where you’re going, and you don’t care where you’ve come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

14. “We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

15. “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

Featured in: Fun Quotes

16. “Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

17. “We must curb ourfury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “We all flee in hope of finding some ground of security.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

19. “The sky was as blue as a stupid postcard, and the islands were as green as islands.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

20. “It’s insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

21. “Older teens tend to write to me and say, ‘Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.’”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

22. “A library is an adjustable wrench for opening the head.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

23. “I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at ‘The Improper Bostonian.’ It’s just something I’ve always loved very deeply.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

24. “I feel like it’s important every once in a while to estrange ourselves from the familiar to remind ourselves of the potentialities of people, how many different ways there are of being.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

25. “I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

26. “A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

27. “I’ve always enjoyed that kind of thing – thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don’t notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

28. “Its a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

29. “I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

30. “Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

31. “Of course, I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven’t spoken to myself since.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

32. “Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it’s very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

33. “If we’re going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don’t see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

34. “I feel like it’s hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

35. “I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I’m about to write that I’m really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

36. “Why not write a book which is as sophisticated as a book for an adult, but is about the concerns that teenagers actually have?”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson

37. “I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.”

— Matthew Tobin Anderson