Meg Rosoff Quotes

#1. The thing about adolescence is that you are emerging from a state of obscurity. You are coming out into the world from your family. Your family can seem normal because it is your family and all you know, but in fact it is a mess.

Meg Rosoff

#2. I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.

Meg Rosoff

#3. My daughter is a fantastic travelling companion - she's totally organised, whereas I'm hopeless.

Meg Rosoff

#4. The open road. What a trio of words. What a vision of blue sky and untouched hills and narrow trails heading God knew where and being free - free and hungry, free and cold, free and wet, free and lost. Who could mourn such conditions, faced with the alternative?

Meg Rosoff

#5. Edmond just lay there smoking and telling me he loved me without saying anything out loud and if there ever was a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about. The

Meg Rosoff

#6. Each day, a new crisis, a new massacre, a new threat of extinction, disease, internecine conflict, meteorological catastrophe... Behold man. Violent, self-serving and ruthless when in power; exploited, miserable and diseased when not.

Meg Rosoff

#7. I was touched that he has considered the fact that there would be two of us, and prepared for it - concrete evidence that I had entered his consciousness at a time when I was not standing in front of him. A thrilling discovery - like seeing a chimp make tools.

Meg Rosoff

#8. Each evening she held his head in her hands and ran her aching fingers thru the thick ruff of fur around his neck. He burrowed against her, sighing devotion.

Meg Rosoff

#9. I spent some of my endless hours of leisure learning how to shoot a gun, which I thought might come in handy someday, if not in the war then back on the streets of New York.

Meg Rosoff

#10. I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.

Meg Rosoff

#11. I mean, why? Why did I go on believing? Did it make sense? Why did I go on thinking, even when [he] slammed me around, that if you are good enough, patient enough, for long enough, your reward will come?

Meg Rosoff

#12. Maybe we shouldn't be living this way, without grass and trees, and ducks, always under pressure, always trying to catch up, never enough time or energy for the things we love, if we can even remember what those things are.

Meg Rosoff

#13. And then without any signal or obvious sign of tansformation, the beach was suddenly alight with fiery stones.

Meg Rosoff

#14. I will not always be happy, but perhaps, if I'm lucky, I will be spared the agony of adding pain to the world.

Meg Rosoff

#15. I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.

Meg Rosoff

#16. She accepted the permission bestowed by passion to live entirely in the present.

Meg Rosoff

#17. It's hard recommending books for kids, and a huge responsibility. If you get it wrong, they don't tell you they hate that particular book, they tell you they hate reading.

Meg Rosoff

#18. I, a late riser, fantasise about getting up every morning at 5 A.M. to fetch the horses in from the fields.

Meg Rosoff

#19. Trying to think inside Finn's head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees.

Meg Rosoff

#20. Every day a piano doesn't fall on my head is good luck.

Meg Rosoff

#21. I hate you, I thought, I hate you with your bloody nature-boy airs and your bloody forced-march voyage of bloody discovery. I wondered then if Finn's personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the the right sort of mentality to fall in step with a self-centered hermit-boy crab murderer.

Meg Rosoff

#22. The real truth is that the war didn't have much to do with it except that it provided a perfect limbo in which two people who were too young and too related could start kissing without anything or anyone making us stop.

Meg Rosoff

#23. I lived in New York for 10 years, and every New Yorker sees a shrink.

Meg Rosoff

#24. His presence silenced, if only for a few seconds, the crackling anxiety that made my blood grate against my bones and for a little while I'd feel melted and soft.

Meg Rosoff

#25. When I was at university, there was such a strong delineation between city kids and those who had grown up the suburbs. City kids were so at home in the world, in a way that suburban kids take years to catch up, if indeed they ever can.

Meg Rosoff

#26. I was happiest when he just came and lay down next to me, and I could almost feel the weight of his body against mine.

Meg Rosoff

#27. Not everything you want to know is explained properly on Google.

Meg Rosoff

#28. Why did you bother creating me, he wanted to ask. Why bother giving me a brain and a realization of how miserable existence can be? Why did you invent creatures who die, and worse, who know they are going to die? What is the point of so unkind an act of creation?

Meg Rosoff

#29. What else? A handful of hard white sugar lumps from the supply for the master's table. Sugar and cake and blood and pork. That's what little boys are made of.

Meg Rosoff

#30. I noticed that once you realize
someone's watching you it's pretty hard not to find yourself
watching them back.

Meg Rosoff

#31. At the time, I didn't have the insight to wonder at the transient nature of despair, but now that I'm older I've seen how little it takes to turn a person's life around for better or worse. An event will do, or an Idea. Another person. An idea of a person.

Meg Rosoff

#32. I didn't seem to have that effect on anyone but it would have been a waste for both of us to be saints.

Meg Rosoff

#33. In the odd moment when I am not thinking about horses, I write books.

Meg Rosoff

#34. Such a courageous boy I was. To act brazenly under scrutiny and risk further injury to my wounded heart. Ah, the resilience, the blind, dumb persistence of youth.

Meg Rosoff

#35. It's a strange sensation to live inside another person's life, to wonder all the time what he is doing, or thinking or feeling.

Meg Rosoff

#36. Every war has turning points and every person too.

Meg Rosoff

#37. That's it," Piper said. "That's the end." But I knew it wasn't. They'd left out a chapter. The one where the hero comes home to find me gone.

Meg Rosoff

#38. Although I've lived in England for more than twenty years, I still have a foreigner's passion for all the details of English history and rural life.

Meg Rosoff

#39. Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.

Meg Rosoff

#40. The things that break your heart when you think there's nothing left to break

Meg Rosoff

#41. I think the bravest thing to write about is nothing, just to write a book in which nothing happens.

Meg Rosoff

#42. Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

Meg Rosoff

#43. The feeling of the cold water and the hot sun and having the river just flow over your skin like a dolphin wasn't something I had enough words to describe but was the kind of feeling you never forget. I

Meg Rosoff

#44. It was love, of course, though I didn't know it then and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees.

Meg Rosoff

#45. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second.

Meg Rosoff

#46. Feeling are like three-year-olds. They're not rational. They're just there.

Meg Rosoff

#47. I loved horses and horse books as a child.

Meg Rosoff

#48. It might go down better than appearing as a giant reptile encased in a ball of fire and forcing yourself on her.'
'WHY DO YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BRING THAT UP?

Meg Rosoff

#49. When I finally got to sleep I found Edmond and told him everything that happened, and he stayed with me for hours and whether I was dreaming or just borderline schizophrenic I didn't know and didn't care either. At

Meg Rosoff

#50. He didn't remember ever being less weird than he was right now. In fact, as far as he could tell he had always been more or less exactly as weird as this. if not more so.

Meg Rosoff

#51. And so, perhaps, when I say I long to be a pane of glass, I am lying. I long for partial obscurity at the same time that I long for someone to know me.

Meg Rosoff

#52. The truth about love is that you don't always fall in love with whom you are supposed to fall in love with. Love just hits you. It is a transcendent thing. Sometimes it is your best friend's husband and sometimes it's your father. It's weird. But that's a fact of life.

Meg Rosoff

#53. In the meantime, Charlie learnt to fly. Dorothea fell in love. Peter discovered a new star. And a great number of things happened to Justin. Hundreds of millions of ordinary, unexpected, and occasionally quite astonishing things.
And that was his fate.

Meg Rosoff

#54. She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.'
'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?

Meg Rosoff

#55. Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

Meg Rosoff

#56. I give thanks for all that has passed, for all that is passing, and for all that is yet to come.

Meg Rosoff

#57. I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the
world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.

Meg Rosoff

#58. If you have the patience to wait and watch, history will reshape truth (weakest of all forces, and weightless) in the image of opinion. What really happened will cease to matter and, eventually, cease to exist.

Meg Rosoff

#59. I was starting to think that except for the deli counters and five or ten thousand other total essentials, supermarkets were pretty much a waste of time.

Meg Rosoff

#60. That was it. I never bothered filling in the details. The
details didn't matter.

Meg Rosoff

#61. Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.

Meg Rosoff

#62. Like many other people of my generation, I don't think I ever really bothered to grow up. I wasn't ever really a proper teenager until I was about 19, and maybe I got a bit stuck there, because it seemed to go on and on.

Meg Rosoff

#63. Teenagers are very dark, I think. That's all the goth and emo stuff. They're experiencing a lot of stuff that adults experience, but in a much more raw way. It's that extremity that I'm interested in, to be able to go down so far and come up so quickly.

Meg Rosoff

#64. I'm not sure I can write about America for the same reason I'm not sure I can write about adults - I have no critical distance on either place.

Meg Rosoff

#65. Accept love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions.

Meg Rosoff

#66. As a person with the retentive mental capacity of a goldfish and a dislike of repetition, I frequently make use of the thesaurus built into my Microsoft Word U.K. Software.

Meg Rosoff

#67. There he lay spooked, a spinning wheel in a celestial bowling alley.

Meg Rosoff

#68. So much relies on one person assuming the other is telling the truth. If a person can lie to you about one thing, he can lie about something else.

Meg Rosoff

#69. But the truth is that nothing distracted me from waiting.
The.Time.Simply.Passed.

Meg Rosoff

#70. I think most people struggle over a matter of years to find a satisfying way to live.

Meg Rosoff

#71. My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.

Meg Rosoff

#72. This was what happiness felt like - this wondrous, miraculous alternative to dread.

Meg Rosoff

#73. Contrary to popular belief, editors and agents are gagging for good books.

Meg Rosoff

#74. Tell me, I say, is there some huge adult conspiracy where people lead unimaginably complex lives and pretend it's normal?

Meg Rosoff

#75. The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever you're trying to tell them.

Meg Rosoff

#76. I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn't be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them - but there's no way I was touching those bugs.

Meg Rosoff

#77. While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.

Meg Rosoff

#78. Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.

Meg Rosoff

#79. In the meantime, Bob was jumping up and down and pronouncing it was all "good good good," so good that he couldn't stop giggling with self-satisfied glee like a demented toddler.

Meg Rosoff

#80. Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.

Meg Rosoff

#81. Fate isn't some middle-aged man with a squint who won't recognize you if you change your clothes.

Meg Rosoff

#82. I can't even trust my own imaginary dog. How much lower can a person get?

Meg Rosoff

#83. Nowadays, I only review books I really like. It's cowardly, I know, but I figure it's not my job to make people unhappy. I'll leave that to the professionals.

Meg Rosoff

#84. And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond.
And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.

Meg Rosoff

#85. Age is not always the best judge of competence.

Meg Rosoff

#86. In my experience, adults rarely bother reading the reviews of children's books and almost never read the books themselves - particularly if they don't have children.

Meg Rosoff

#87. Bob's talent, such as it is, consists entirely of the few unconscious charms of youth: its energy, audacity and complete inability to recognize its own shortcomings.

Meg Rosoff

#88. Then I just closed my eyes and watched the blossom petals fall and

Meg Rosoff

#89. because we were all catching on to the fact that some questions were better not asked. Piper

Meg Rosoff

#90. The more you live, the better writer you are.

Meg Rosoff

#91. The imagination can be dangerous. It can change the world. And that is why we write.

Meg Rosoff

#92. Quick-wittedness can be very lonely.

Meg Rosoff

#93. When I'm writing I can write anywhere; when I'm not writing I can't write anywhere.

Meg Rosoff

#94. Even then I knew that happiness was something in which to plunge headlong, and damn the torpedoes

Meg Rosoff

#95. I'm a century old, an impossible age, and my brain has no anchor in the present. Instead it drifts, nearly always to the same shore. Today, as most days, it is 1962. The year I discovered love.

Meg Rosoff

#96. I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.

Meg Rosoff

#97. To hide her relief, Laura stepped forward and embraced her daughter. 'My poor darling. He's not worth weeping over. If he doesn't appreciate a girl like you ... ' But, even to her own ears, the words sounded quaint. What man ever warranted the tears shed on his behalf?

Meg Rosoff

#98. Life's pleasures were so simple, really. It was all a matter of appreciating what you had - and knowing that things could always be worse.

Meg Rosoff

#99. some people are lonely for all the right reasons. After

Meg Rosoff

#100. I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

Meg Rosoff