Meg Rosoff Quotes

#1. I'd like to think life has improved since 1850, despite the long hours we all seem to spend slaving over hot computers, but the psychological journeys remain the same - the search for love, identity, a meaningful place in the world.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#3. Fate is trying to kill me. I miss my dog. What's a doctor going to say? You're not ill, you're mad as a muffin? They'll either lock me up or tell me to get a grip and no one will believe the truth anyway.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#6. 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

#7. She sometimes makes me think of a planet rocketing along in a parallel universe

Meg Rosoff

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#14. 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

#15. He would like to be held in the arms of this clear-eyed, clear-voiced girl, who seems to be the only creature among all of his acquaintances who cares for something beside self-glorification and the gratification of her own desires.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. I've been fired five times for having a bad attitude.

Meg Rosoff

#21. If you haven't been in a war and are wondering how long it takes to get used to losing everything you think you need or love, I can tell you the answer is no time at all.

Meg Rosoff

#22. 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

#23. My husband is my most valuable resource.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#25. Eck tilts his head and gently licks Bob's ear with his long, sticky tongue. It is his special way of expressing sympathy and it is not effective.

Meg Rosoff

#26. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#29. After all this time, I know exactly where I belong. Here. With Edmond. And that's how I live now.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#31. 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

#32. How doe we define the energy of thought versus the energy of action.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#34. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#36. There's an overwhelming sense of paranoia in the suburbs. People there seem so much more paranoid to me than people in the city about their kids being kidnapped or their parties being raided or their drinks being spiked. There's a kind of hysteria about that.

Meg Rosoff

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#40. It says: "Baltic Amber, fifty million years old and full of fire; warm, and enduring like love". Wonderfully romantic, don't you think? Only I don't know how to differntiate thestuff from plain old yellow stones.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#43. Maybe he's lonely, she said, and I just looked at her wondering if she expected me to open a Home for the Socially Challenged or what. Then she started giggling and I had the feeling we were thinking the same thing, namely, some people are lonely for all the right reasons.

Meg Rosoff

#44. 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

#45. We couldn't believe our luck, and for a little while it felt like we were on some big train rolling down a hill, and all we cared about was how great it felt to be going fast.

Meg Rosoff

#46. 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

#47. I was pretty far gone, but not so far gone that I thought anyone with half a toehold in reality would think what we were doing was a good idea.

Meg Rosoff

#48. I am quite a cheerful, dark person. On the outside, I'm optimistic but I expect the worst to happen.

Meg Rosoff

#49. Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

Meg Rosoff

#50. I have never written out of a desire to be controversial.

Meg Rosoff

#51. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#53. Suzanne is not a horrible person masquerading as a nice one, just an angry one pretending to be normal.

Meg Rosoff

#54. I know from experience that careers do not always arise from a deep sense of destiny.

Meg Rosoff

#55. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. I should have liked this particular story to end with me settled happily ever after in the hut on the island, but it didn't happen. It wasn't long before I had to face the fact that I was living in the sea.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#61. 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

#62. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. Life doesn't go on forever, and you don't want to drop dead without ever having done what you wanted to do.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#73. It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

Meg Rosoff

#74. We are three. Even when we are just two, we are three.

Meg Rosoff

#75. When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.

Meg Rosoff

#76. I skim through time and space at the speed of thought. The unknown is my prey, I bring it to earth in a single exquisite bound.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#78. 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

#79. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#81. 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

#82. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#84. 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

#85. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#87. 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

#88. The soldier had stamped my passport FAMILY in heavy black capital letters and I checked it now for reassurance and because I liked how fierce the word looked

Meg Rosoff

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. Pouring breakfast cereal into a bowl, he saw his life crashing down in smoking ruins.

Meg Rosoff

#92. If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about.

Meg Rosoff

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

Meg Rosoff

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

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

Meg Rosoff

#98. 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

#99. 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

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

Meg Rosoff