Jerry Spinelli
He doesn't think. He just does. A nonthinking doer.Collection: Thinking
Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.Collection: Rain
It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.Collection: Night
In every age there are plenty of people around to remind you what you cannot possibly do. Thank goodness, for these naysayers provide a priceless service: They spur...us to achieve great things.Collection: People
Her smile put the sunflower to shame.Collection: Sunflower
We live in a silent explosion, Everything is flying away from everything else... flying away... flying away...Collection: Flying
Nothing’s more fun than being carried away.Collection: Fun
Who are you?' I didn't understand the question. I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?' I gave him my name. 'Stopthief.Collection: Names
Don't confine yourself to a select group of friends, often known as a clique. Cliques by definition leave people out. Lock yourself into one, and you'll never know how many terrific friendships you may be missing.Collection: People
A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?Collection: Baseball
The flash would prove that proton decay really happens. The flash would mean that the matter of the proton - the solid stuff - had turned into the energy of the flash (E-mc2). Totally. Nothing left behind. No ash. No smoke. No smell. Nada. One moment it's there, the next moment - pffft - gone. What would it mean? Only this: Nothing lasts. Nothing. Because everything that exists is made of protons.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Mind
Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart.Collection: Running
She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow.Collection: Cactus
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?Collection: Kindness
He said even if it's too cloudy to see, the sun will still rise, it will still be there. "But that's the whole point," I said. "Seeing it." "Is it?" he said.Collection: Sun
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 cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Life
Angels and crows passed each other, one leaving, the other coming.Collection: Death
Who doesn't love a compliment? But every compliment comes with a warning: Beware—Do Not Overuse. Go ahead, sniff your compliment. Take a little sip. But don't chew, don't swallow. If you do, you risk abandoning the good work that inspired the compliment in the first place. If that happens, maybe it was the compliment and not the job well done that you were aiming for all along.Collection: Jobs
We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... We discovered the color of each other's eyes.Collection: Eye
So," he said, "we ourselves will be the candle flames." He put his hands on his chest. "Feel your hearts, how warm they are.Collection: Heart
I'm that way, goofy as it sounds. Sometimes I don't want things to happen-I'm talking about good things, even wonderful things-because once they happen, I can't look forward to them anymore. But there's an upside, too. Once a wonderful thing is over, I'm not all that sad because then I can start thinking about it, reliving and reliving it in the virtual world in my head.Collection: Thinking
Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of.Collection: Morning
His smile was so wide he’d have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorwayCollection: Doorways
To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with -- what else -- mica.Collection: Beach
Happy". I had not heard that word since Mr. Milgrom spoke it at the last Hanukkah. I asked him the question that had been on my mind since then. "Tata, what is happy?" He looked at me and at the ceiling and back to me. "Did you ever taste an orange?" he said.Collection: Orange
Heart and head are contrary historians.Collection: Heart
A mockingbird has moved into our neighborhood. It perches atop a telephone pole behind our backyard. Every morning it is the first thing I hear. It is impossible to be unhappy when listening to a mockingbird. So stuffed with songs it is, it can't seem to make up it's mind which to sing first, so it sings them all, a dozen different songs at once, in a dozen different voices. On and on it sings without a pause, so peppy, even frantic, as if its voice alone is keeping the world awake.Collection: Song
I'm Sorry are two of the most powerful words in our language, especially when they are not flipped blithely over the shoulder but spoken from the heart. They help restore order, balance, harmony. They reduce pain. They heal broken friendship. If they were medecine, they'd be called a miracle.Collection: Sorry
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.Collection: Past
No one's hurt is too small, no worry too removed, no blessing so elusive that it cannot be seen by the eyes in the back of the human heart.Collection: Hurt
The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.Collection: Sky
Beware of solipsism Funny word. Sounds like it means "love of melons" or something. I looked it up. It means believing that "the self is the only reality." Am I solipsist?Collection: Believe
Tell me I didn't imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in seperate 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.Collection: Stars
I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag -- it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off.Collection: Eye
Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.Collection: Past
It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.Collection: Years
The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way.Collection: Writing
I listen to the summer symphony outside my window. Truthfully, it's not a symphony at all. There's no tune, no melody, only the same notes over and over. Chirps and tweets and trills and burples. It's as if the insect orchestra is forever tuning its instruments, forever waiting for the maestro to tap his baton and bring them to order. I, for one, hope the maestro never comes. I love the music mess of it.Collection: Music
Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters. "I hate change," she said. "It's so . . . jangly." "Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?" I said. "Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?"Collection: Hate
Events become feelings, feelings become eventsCollection: Feelings
I didn't realize we were being watched. We were all being watchedCollection: Realizing
She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my lifeCollection: Laughing
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.Collection: Nice
It was different with you, Leo. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same.Collection: Heart
When bad things turn good, the reason can usually be found in the human heart—sometimes in the hearts of great masses of people, sometimes in the heart of a solitary soul.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Stars
The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long.Collection: Long