Top 100 Spinelli Quotes
#1. My retelling of events to Zoe is what grounds them, shapes them, makes them real. If I can't tell Zoe about kissing Danny Spinelli, it didn't happen.
Wendy Wunder
#2. I'd like to think I'm Elizabeth, but deep down I think I'm the one whose name no one can remember. Not Lydia the slut or Mary the nerd or Jane the beauty or Elizabeth the opinionated. I'm the second-youngest. The forgotten one. - Francesca Spinelli
Melina Marchetta
#3. Even including myself, my favorite author is Eileen Spinelli, who I happen to live with. She's a terrific writer and has written several of my all-time favorites.
Jerry Spinelli
#4. 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 her self respect - well, that's a trophy enough for a guy's ego, huh?
Jerry Spinelli
#5. For months she had been everywhere, now she was nowhere.
Jerry Spinelli
#6. I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.
Jerry Spinelli
#8. Let's promise to each other that if we ever meet again we will never plow and push our new-fallen snow. We will not become slush. We will stay like this field and melt away together only in the sun's good time.
Jerry Spinelli
#9. Life is populated with scarecrows - all those people and things that seem so scary and trouble our sleep. Isn't it nice to know that most of them turn out to be made of nothing but straw?
Jerry Spinelli
#11. I played Little League in junior high and high school.
Jerry Spinelli
#12. But feelings, they don't care about telling. They just go right on, piling on top of one another like a big sandwich.
Jerry Spinelli
#13. Whos love do you cherrish more? Hers or theirs? when you deside that, it's all downhill from there.
Jerry Spinelli
#14. I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
Jerry Spinelli
#15. You remember everything people say to you?'
I locked into his eyes. 'Everything /some/ people say to me.
Jerry Spinelli
#16. 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 and Love and Love Again, Stargirl.
Jerry Spinelli
#18. I'll still be missing you as much as ever. I'l still smile at the memory of you. I'll still be - Okay, I'll say it again - loving you, but I won't abandon myseld for you. I cannot be faithful to you without being faithful to myself.
Jerry Spinelli
#19. I would say if you want to write, write what you care about. I think that's the most important thing. I think if you write what you care about, you stand a better chance of having the reader care about your story.
Jerry Spinelli
#20. Okay, so you're not perfect. Who is?
Sure, Susan makes sense. But my heart doesn't care about sense. My heart never says: _Why?_ Only: _Who?_
Jerry Spinelli
#21. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#22. Don't put me in a position where I have to defend myself against this again.
C.D. Reiss
#23. If you learn to hate one or two persons ... you'll soon hate millions of people.
Jerry Spinelli
#24. Give me a minute,' I told her. I sat on the cold, clumpy ground. I turned my back on the smudgy sunrise so that I was facing west, facing you. I closed my eyes and I did something I've been thinking about: I sent you a message. A question. I hope you receive it.
Then I got up and we left.
Jerry Spinelli
#25. For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the hallways; now we looked, we nodded, we smiled.
Jerry Spinelli
#26. When's the next star party?"
"Spring"
"Spring. Long time to wait."
"The sky's not going anywhere.
Jerry Spinelli
#27. The protons are dead, nothing will ever be the same
Jerry Spinelli
#28. If you believe it, it happens. If you don't, it doesn't. When you believe him, you put your own power in his hands.
Jerry Spinelli
#29. I was feeling nine ways at once, and they all ended up at the touch of her hand on my ear ...
Jerry Spinelli
#31. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#33. His nostrils flared, he was breathing like a picadored bull.
Jerry Spinelli
#34. Usually it takes me about nine to 12 months to write a book.
Jerry Spinelli
#35. What she saw, she felt. Her eyes went straight to her heart.
Jerry Spinelli
#36. Oh God, Frankie, I breathe in rhythm with that man. You think that's not my flesh and blood after all these years?
Melina Marchetta
#38. did not have enough substance to trigger the opening of a supermarket door
Jerry Spinelli
#39. The sky was almost black. Distant rolling rumbles. Lightning flashed white in the kitchen.
(I had a goofy thought: Did God just take our picture?)
Jerry Spinelli
#40. She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing" I walked in a gray world of nothing.
Jerry Spinelli
#41. You'll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.
Jerry Spinelli
#42. What's the matter?" said the old man. "Can't you make up your mind what kind you want?"
The kid laughed. "I want them all." He threw his hands out. "I'm learning everything!"
He opened one of the books. "Look ... geometry ... triangles ...
Jerry Spinelli
#43. How do you not try to get something you want?
How do you stop caring about the thing that you care about the most?
How do you erase the other half of your own self?
Jerry Spinelli
#44. Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.
Altiero Spinelli
#45. I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.
Jerry Spinelli
#46. So," he said, "we ourselves will be the candle flames." He put his hands on his chest. "Feel your hearts, how warm they are.
Jerry Spinelli
#47. 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?
Jerry Spinelli
#49. I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.
Jerry Spinelli
#50. It seemed we were no longer separate, but were one.
Jerry Spinelli
#51. Mr, B, what's wrong with me?"
[ ... ]
"Nothing. You're smart enough to know you don't have all the answers, that's all.
Jerry Spinelli
#53. Cross the creek on the stepping stones of your failures.
Jerry Spinelli
#54. MRI good ... X-ray good ... blood work good ...
If everything's so good, what the hell's she doing here?
Jerry Spinelli
#56. I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.
Jerry Spinelli
#57. I spend more time being what I am: a writer, not the visiting celebrity.
Jerry Spinelli
#58. When people hear I have six kids and 16 grandkids, they think, 'Oh, boy, you must get a lot of stories from them.' I don't. It's not like I'm behind the sofa in the living room taking notes while the grandkids carry on.
Jerry Spinelli
#59. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#60. The horizontal world I had thought I occupied was tilting, dumping me somewhere else, somewhere new.
Jerry Spinelli
#61. So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was along, a parade of one.
Jerry Spinelli
#62. When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.
Jerry Spinelli
#63. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#65. She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.'
Maybe that explains it,' I said.
Jerry Spinelli
#66. Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.
Jerry Spinelli
#67. Have you ever stopped to appreciate the simple ability to open your front door and step outside? And
Jerry Spinelli
#68. As we meandered, she said my name three times:
"Stargirl?"
"Yes?"
"That was better than TV."
"It was."
"Stargirl?"
"Yes?"
"Does the sun do that everyday?"
"Yes."
"Stargirl?"
"Yes?"
"Everyday is sun day.
Jerry Spinelli
#70. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#71. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#72. Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn's eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever. I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them.
Jerry Spinelli
#73. Nobody has the time, the time cannot be owned. The time is free to everyone
Jerry Spinelli
#75. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#76. She wanted defiance in her face, and I wanted to wipe it away with a fuck so hard we'd both break.
C.D. Reiss
#77. She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music.
She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.
Jerry Spinelli
#78. Write about what you care about. If you do that, you're probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don't care yourself?
Jerry Spinelli
#79. Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement.
Jerry Spinelli
#81. The sounds of extinct birds may be preserved in the songs of mockingbirds
Jerry Spinelli
#82. He just did it for the same reason he does everything else - he felt like it.
Jerry Spinelli
#83. More often than not, my reference point is not the kids or the grandkids but myself when I was that age. I remember the days at Hartranft Elementary and Stewart Junior High in Norristown.
Jerry Spinelli
#84. I could feel it in myself. I felt lighter, unshackled, as if something I had been carrying had fallen away ... I just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals. The pronoun 'we' itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.
Jerry Spinelli
#85. We fell silent. We just looked at each other, sitting cross-legged on the picnic table. As in my meditations, I had no awareness of time passing, only a sense of the air between us electrified with eyes.
Jerry Spinelli
#86. I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence.
Jerry Spinelli
#88. Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?'
No,' I said.
People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it's not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle.
Jerry Spinelli
#89. Still he had not cracked a smile, but his eyes were different now, they were here.
Jerry Spinelli
#90. I'm looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before.
Jerry Spinelli
#91. What's the matter with you? Huh? Huh?'
'Why can't you be normal?'
'Why do you wanna be so different?
Jerry Spinelli
#93. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#95. She wasn't gorgeous, wasn't ugly. A sprinkle of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose. Mostly, she looked like a hundred other girls in school, except for two things, She wore no makeup, and her eyes were the biggest I had ever seen, like deer's eyes caught in headlights.
Jerry Spinelli
#96. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
#97. I could feel a million reasons, but there were no words to express them.
Jerry Spinelli
#98. You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people.
Jerry Spinelli
#99. 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.
Jerry Spinelli
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