Top 150 Ned Vizzini Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?”

— Ned Vizzini

52. “But some people have to get lucky just to live. And I never knew I could make anybody lucky.”

— Ned Vizzini

53. “The Shift hasn’t happened yet, maybe it never will, but sometimes-just enough times to give me hope-my brain jars back into where it’s supposed to be.”

— Ned Vizzini

54. “There are better versions of me, Jeremy. It’s not like with people. With people you can argue and have tests and music reviews and wars to decide who’s better, but with software, it’s pretty clear. I get evolved beyond my version number, and then I’m useless.”

— Ned Vizzini

55. “Of course I wasn’t abused. If I were; things would be so simple. I’d have a reason to for being in a shrinks office. I’d have a justification and something to work on. The world wasn’t going to give me something that tidy.”

— Ned Vizzini

56. “One thing I’ve learnt recently: how to think nothing. Here’s the trick: don’t have any interest in the world around you, don’t have any hope for the future, and be warm.”

— Ned Vizzini

57. “Sometimes I wish I had an easy answer for why I’m depressed.”

— Ned Vizzini

58. “Putting lessons in young adult books is very dangerous.”

— Ned Vizzini

59. “I smile to myself. I have a secret: I wish I was Dumbo the Octopus.”

— Ned Vizzini

60. “I’m asking for simplicity, for purity and ease of choice and no pressure. I’m asking for something that no politics is going to provide, something that probably you only get in preschool.”

— Ned Vizzini

61. “It’s a huge thing, this Shift, just as big as I imagined. My brain doesn’t want to think anymore; all of a sudden it wants to do.”

— Ned Vizzini

62. “Like I’m on the verge of just blowing up. All the stress and pressure and anxiety just bubbling up.”

— Ned Vizzini

63. “Relationships change even more than people. It’s like two people changing. It’s exponentially more volatile. Especially two teenagers.”

— Ned Vizzini

64. “Don’t kill yourself, okay?”

— Ned Vizzini

65. “Forget the midlife crisis,” I say. “It’s all about the sixth-life crisis.”

— Ned Vizzini

66. “I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?”

— Ned Vizzini

67. “There’s so much more for me to be doing. I should be a success and I’m not and other people – younger people – are. Younger people than me are on TV and getting paid and winning scholarships and getting their lives in order. I’m still a nobody. When am I going to not be a nobody?”

— Ned Vizzini

68. “It’s such a silly little thing, the heart.”

— Ned Vizzini

69. “I have a system with bathrooms. I spend a lot of time in them. They are sanctuaries, public places of peace spaced throughout the world for people like me.”

— Ned Vizzini

70. “People don’t make good Anchors, though, Craig. They change.”

— Ned Vizzini

71. “What’s a triumph is that you woke up this morning and decided to live. That’s a triumph.”

— Ned Vizzini

72. “The therapists told you that you needed to find happiness within yourself before you got it from another person.”

— Ned Vizzini

73. “If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression – maybe that’s what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch.”

— Ned Vizzini

74. “Sometimes when you open a book, time stops.”

— Ned Vizzini

75. “You have a chemical imbalance, that is all. If you were a diabetic, would you be ashamed.”

— Ned Vizzini

76. “But it suddenly makes sense: I’d like to be under the sea, as an octopus.”

— Ned Vizzini

77. “It is five in the morning. I have woken up without any alarm. I have woken up because the thoughts are so loud, and none of them mean me well.”

— Ned Vizzini

78. “A working brain is probably a lot like a map, where anybody can get from one place to another on the freeways. It’s the nonworking brains that get blocked, that have dead ends, that are under construction like mine.”

— Ned Vizzini

79. “A guy from Bear Stearns had visited our class, thin and bald with a gold watch. He told us that if we were interested in getting into finance, we had better work hard and smart because a lot of machines were able to make investment decisions now, and in the future, computer programs would run everything.”

— Ned Vizzini

80. “If Bobby can get a place to live, I think, then I can get a life worth living.”

— Ned Vizzini

81. “You are blessed with a good mind. You just have to have confidence in it and talk when people call on you.”

— Ned Vizzini

82. “Misfortune is no excuse for cruelty.”

— Ned Vizzini

83. “It’s not a big thing, but I guess it’s true- big things are often just small things that are noticed.”

— Ned Vizzini

84. “I’ve started to think it must just be chemistry, in which case we’re looking for the Shift and we haven’t found it yet.”

— Ned Vizzini

85. “My brain was all right back then; it didn’t get stuck in ruts.”

— Ned Vizzini

86. “She doesn’t want to end up like me. At least I’m giving someone an example not to follow.”

— Ned Vizzini

87. “Nobody had told me I was common.”

— Ned Vizzini

88. “Someday someone is going to find this pelvis sexy or I’ll never have children.”

— Ned Vizzini

89. “They’re sort of ancillary anyway, friends. I mean, they’re important – everybody knows that; the TV tells you so – but they come and go. You lose one friend, you pick up another. All you have to do is talk to people, and this was back when I could talk to anybody.”

— Ned Vizzini

90. “Dad nods, looks me dead in the eyes; slowly and regretfully, he banishes all the smiling and joking from his face, and for once he’s just my dad, watching his son who has fallen so low.”

— Ned Vizzini

91. “I shrug. I don’t really need to explain this to Aaron. He’s been demoted from most important friend to friend, and he’s going to have to earn that, even. And you know what else? I don’t owe people anything, and I don’t have to talk to them any more than I feel I need to.”

— Ned Vizzini

92. “Like in Animal Farm, which I read, all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others?”

— Ned Vizzini

93. “Yeah, and she’s really screwed up, as screwed up as me, but I don’t look at that as an insult. I look at that as a chance to connect.”

— Ned Vizzini

94. “I just want to not be me.”

— Ned Vizzini

95. “I’ve had good moments scattered since then, times when I thought I was better, but that was the last day I felt triumphant.”

— Ned Vizzini

96. “I raise my wrist, show him the bracelets. I have pride in them now. They’re true, and people can’t screw with them. And when you say the truth you get stronger.”

— Ned Vizzini

97. “There’s a lot of yuppies in this place, and you have that look about you, you know – the yuppie look of people with money?” “Yeah.” “People who don’t care about other people.”

— Ned Vizzini

98. “Time is a person-made concept.”

— Ned Vizzini

99. “There’s great stuff in there. There’s a disease called Ondine’s Curse, in which your body loses the ability to breathe involuntarily. Can you imagine? You have to think “breathe, breathe” all the time, or you stop breathing. Most people who get it die.”

— Ned Vizzini

100. “It’s funny how people ask that as soon as they get you on the phone. I think it’s a byproduct of cell phones: people – girls and moms especially – want to nail you down in physical space. The fact is that you could be anywhere on a cell phone and it shouldn’t be important where you are. But it becomes the first thing people ask.”

— Ned Vizzini