Meg Rosoff famous quotes

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

#Book #Character #Kissing

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

#Heart #Thinking #Laughing

I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Credit #Enough #Manage

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

#Jobs #Heart #Writing

Now let's try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn't exactly been on my list of Things to Do while visiting England,but I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Fall #Emotional #Blood

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

#Real #War #Kissing

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

#Soldier #Black #Letters

This was what happiness felt like - this wondrous, miraculous alternative to dread.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Alternatives #Dread #Miraculous

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

#War #Thinking #Long

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

#Fire #Balls #Reptiles

After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.
-- Meg Rosoff

Every war has turning points and every person too.
-- Meg Rosoff

#War #Persons

Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Lines #Lost

but all I could think was in New York that kid would have been stuck in a straitjacket practically from birth and dangled over a tank full of Educational Consultants and Remedial Experts all snapping at his ankles for the next twenty years arguing about his Special Needs and getting paid plenty for it.
-- Meg Rosoff

#New York #Educational #Kids

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

#Finding Yourself #Realizing

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

#War #Night #World

Staying alive was what we did to pass the time.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Alive #Staying Alive

A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Nice #Fall #Piano

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Writing #Dark #Self

The average attention span of the modern human being is about half as long as whatever youre trying to tell them.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Average #Long #Trying

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

#Fate #Men #Clothes

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

#Meaningful #Journey #Thinking

I've noticed that the magic getting along with someone isn't really magic. If you break it down, you can see how it happens. You say something a bit off-center and see if they react. If they get it, they push it a bit further. Then it's your turn again. And theirs. And so on, until it's banter. Once it's banter, it's friendship.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Magic #Break #Banter

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

#Morning #Horse #Fields

The imagination can be dangerous. It can change the world. And that is why we write.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Writing #Imagination #World

Accept love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Responsibility #Accepting

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

#Waiting #Matter #Watches

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

#Mother #Daughter #Hopeless

It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Offering #Ironic #Asking

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

#Perfect #Heard

I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Sea #Swim #Leap

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Beautiful #Dream #Lying

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

#Ideas #Despair #Littles

I love you. I'm madly in love with you. Well, madly obviously, given I'm mad as a mudlark. But you saved my life. I'd be dead without you. And you're so good to me. And you love me too. How lucky is that? Amazing! Amazingly lucky. I can't live without you. You're my lucky charm." She felt a sudden desire to kill Justin's well-meaning friend.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Love You #Mad #Desire

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

#Dog #Believe #Fate

I can't even trust my own imaginary dog. How much lower can a person get?
-- Meg Rosoff

#Dog #Imaginary #Persons

The facts of his existence are plain. I know that he will never silence those unspeakable voices. He heard how people killed, and how they died and their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him. He didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself. You could see that from the scars on him.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Hate #Voice #People

I guess the difference between Gin and me is that when Gin got shut in the barn she thought Edmond didn't love her anymore but because I could feel Edmond out there somewhere always loving me I didn't have to howl all night.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Night #Differences #Barns

I frightened myself. I became the ghost Piper was so scared of.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Scared #Ghost #Frightened

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

#Saint #Waste

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

#Dog #Cake #Creative

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

#Heart #Persistence #Boys

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

#Responsibility #Tree #Accepted

The things that break your heart when you think there`s nothing left to break
-- Meg Rosoff

#Heart #Thinking #Break

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

#Reality #Thinking #Ideas

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

#Anchors #Years #Brain

Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Dear #Things Happen

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

#Feelings #Brain #Alive

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

#Civilization #Noses #Decline

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

#Thinking #Feelings #Strange

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

#Solitude #World #Cures

I give thanks for all that has passed, for all that is passing, and for all that is yet to come.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Giving #Thanks #Passing

Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Player #Tennis #Comedian

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

#Heart #Hands #Fire

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.
-- Meg Rosoff

#Life Is #Horror #Horrific