Jerry Spinelli
"And so I'm me again, Leo. Thanks to the example of a five-year-old. I'm hoping you wouldn't want it any other way. Not that you weren't flattered, right? I mean, to have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and self-respect - well, that's trophy enough for any guy's ego, huh?" [Love, Stargirl]
"As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other's eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.” [Stargirl]
"Be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth."
"Cross the creek on the stepping stones of your failures."
"Do not follow me! Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!" [Love, Stargirl]
"Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me. " [Love, Stargirl]
“For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black…. the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.” [Maniac Magee]
"I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins." [Love, Stargirl]
"I feel like I'm playing chess underwater. The pieces keep floating away. I don't know where things are. I can't figure out tomorrow." [Smiles to Go]
"I felt alone on the planet, drifting through the cosmos. With both hands I reached out to the night. There was no answer. Or maybe I just couldn't hear it." [Love, Stargirl]
"I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I’m a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time.” [Stargirl]
"If you start by hating one or two people, you won't be able to stop. Pretty soon you'll hate a hundred people."
"A zillion?"
"Even a zillion. A little hatred goes a long, long way. It grows and grows. And it's hungry." [Love, Stargirl]
"I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.” [Stargirl]
"It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a whole commotion going on inside us." [Stargirl]
"Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don’t rent them out to tomorrow […] You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you , but now you’ll never know." [Love, Stargirl]
"Love is big. Love makes room for conflicting feelings." [Today I Will]
"She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day." [Stargirl]
"She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew." [Stargirl]
"Tell me I didn't imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in separate states, our star selves shared an enchanted place. Tell me that right around noon today (eastern time) you had the strangest sensation: a tiny chill on your shoulder...a flutter in the heart...a shadow of strawberry-banana crossing your tongue...tell me you whispered my name." [Love, Stargirl]
"The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper." [Stargirl]
"They say talk is cheap. Maybe so. But kindness is even better—it's free! Free to give. Free to receive. Makes you wonder why there's not more of it, huh?" [Today I Will]
"We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance." [Stargirl]
"When you own nothing, it's easy to let things go." [Milkweed]
" ‘Where were we?’ she said.
‘Getting credit,’ I said.
‘What about it?’
‘Well, it's nice to get credit.’
The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. ‘Is it?’ she said." [Stargirl]
"Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore." [Love, Stargirl]