Top 57 Robert Cormier Quotes
#1. I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.
Robert Cormier
#3. There are moments that stop the heart, that catch the breath, that halt the beat of blood in your veins, and you are suspended in time, held between life and death, and you wait for something to bring you back again.
Robert Cormier
#4. And he did see
that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.
Robert Cormier
#5. It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.
Robert Cormier
#6. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.
Robert Cormier
#7. At some point in life, we learn our limitations, the distances we can we can travel and the boarders we will never cross. And we go from there.
Robert Cormier
#8. Happiness is a way of traveling and not a destination
Robert Cormier
#9. Eric Poole began with cats. Or, to be more exact, kittens.
Robert Cormier
#11. Family life was wonderful. The streets were bleak. The playgrounds were bleak. But home was always warm. My mother and father had a great relationship. I always felt 'safe' there.
Robert Cormier
#12. He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.
Robert Cormier
#13. Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?
Robert Cormier
#14. There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.
Robert Cormier
#15. I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.
Robert Cormier
#16. The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
Robert Cormier
#17. Nothing glamorous like the write-ups in the papers or the newsreels. We weren't heroes. We were only there ...
Robert Cormier
#18. A smile for all the stupid people out there with bleeding hearts for serial killers.
Robert Cormier
#20. You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.
Robert Cormier
#21. I'm weary of the battle. But a tired fighter can still be a fighter.
Robert Cormier
#23. What could he say? After the phone calls and the beating. After the desecration of his locker. The silent treatment. Pushed downstairs. What they did to Goober, to Brother Eugene. What guys like Archie and Janza did to the school. What they would do to the world when they left Trinity.
Robert Cormier
#24. Often he rose early in the morning, before anyone else, and poured himself liquid through the sunrise streets, and everything seemed beautiful, everything in its proper orbit, nothing impossible, the entire world attainable.
Robert Cormier
#25. I have lived a thousand lives lost within the pages of a book.
Robert Cormier
#26. He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.
Robert Cormier
#27. They tell you to do your own thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.
Robert Cormier
#28. My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.
Robert Cormier
#29. The cheese stands alone
The cheese stands alone
Heigh-ho the merry-o
The cheese stands alone
Robert Cormier
#30. All the stories I'll ever need are right here on Main Street.
Robert Cormier
#31. It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it.
Robert Cormier
#32. That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.
Robert Cormier
#33. They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.
Robert Cormier
#34. Pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.
Robert Cormier
#36. Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.
Robert Cormier
#37. A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.
Robert Cormier
#38. A writer must take risks, defy the odds, be a bit obsessed and a little mad.
Robert Cormier
#39. Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.
Robert Cormier
#40. Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.
Robert Cormier
#41. I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.
Robert Cormier
#42. I take real people and put them in extraordinary situations.
Robert Cormier
#43. You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.
Robert Cormier
#44. Sometimes I wake up at night in a panic. Wondering: What will my life be like? And sometimes I even wonder: Who am I? What am I doing here, on this planet, in this city, in this house? And it gives me the shivers, makes me panic.
Robert Cormier
#45. I had my bully, and it was excruciating. Not only the bully, but the intimidation I felt.
Robert Cormier
#46. A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.
Robert Cormier
#47. There was nothing more beautiful in the world than the sight of a teacher getting upset.
Robert Cormier
#48. Do I dare disturb the universe?
Yes, I do, I do. I think.
Jerry suddenly understood the poster
the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.
Robert Cormier
#49. People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.
Robert Cormier
#50. Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument.
Robert Cormier
#51. He closed the locker quickly so no one would see the damage. For some reason, he felt ashamed.
Robert Cormier
#52. The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?
Robert Cormier
#53. It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.
Robert Cormier
#54. You seldom get a censorship attempt from a 14-year-old boy. It's the adults who get upset.
Robert Cormier
#55. Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.
Robert Cormier
#56. I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.
Robert Cormier
#57. It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.
Robert Cormier
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