S. E. Hinton famous quotes

nothing can wear you out like caring about people
-- S. E. Hinton

#Caring #People

I really do like listening to stuff that's happened to other people. I guess that's why I like to read.
-- S. E. Hinton

#People #Listening #Stuff

Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Sunset #Two #Saws

There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Real #Fighting #Self

You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. There's still lots of good in the world. Tell Dally. I don't think he knows.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Thinking #Outsiders #World

I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Truth #Lying #Believe

I am a greaser. I am a JD and a hood. I blacken the name of our fair city. I beat up people. I rob gas stations. I am a menace to society. Man do I have fun!
-- S. E. Hinton

#Fun #Men #Cities

They grew up on the outside of society. They weren't looking for a fight. They were looking to belong.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Fighting #Grew #Grew Up

I used to be sure of things. Me, once i had all the answers. I wish i was a kid again, when i had all the answers
-- S. E. Hinton

#Kids #Wish #Answers

It seemed funny that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps was the same one. Maybe the two worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Sunset #Two #Saws

Sixteen years on the streets and you can learn a lot. But all the wrong things, not the things you want to learn. Sixteen years on the streets and you see a lot. But all the wrong sights, not the things you want to see.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Life #Sight #Years

Can you see the sunset real good on the West side? You can see it on the East side too.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Real #Sunset #West

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Trying #Stuff #Influence

The difference is that was then, this is now.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Differences

I advise writing to oneself. If you don't want to read it, nobody else is going to read it.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Writing #Want #Advise

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Home #Two #House

Movies can't ruin books. They can only ruin movies.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Book #Ruins

Rat race is the perfect name for it,' she said. 'We're always going and going and going, and never asking where. Did you ever hear of having more than you wanted? So that you couldn't want anything else and then started looking for something else to want? It seems like we're always searching for something to satisfy is, and never finding it. Maybe if we could lose our cool we would.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Names #Race #Perfect

Things are rough all over.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Rough

I go straight from thinking about my narrator to being him.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Writing #Thinking #Narrators

Nothing sparkly can stay.
-- S. E. Hinton

But Dally, heaters kill people! Ya' kill 'em with switchblades to, don'tcha?
-- S. E. Hinton

#People #Ems

Johnny almost grinned as he nodded. "Tuff enough," he managed, and by the way his eyes were glowing, I figured Southern gentlemen had nothing on Johnny Cade.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Eye #Glowing #Southern

...I knew he would be dead, because Dally Winston wanted to be dead and he always got what he wanted.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Would Be #Wanted

It was too vast a problem to be just a personal thing. There should be some help, someone should tell them before it was too late. Someone should tell their side of the story, and maybe people would understand then, and wouldn’t be so quick to judge a boy by the amount of hair oil he wore.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Boys #Hair #Oil

I made up my mind that I'd get out of that place and I didI learned that if you want to get somewhere, you just make up your mind and work like hell til you get there. If you want to go somewhere in life, you just have to work till you make it.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Mind #Want #Hell

I had it then. Soda fought for fun, Steve for hatred, Darry for pride, and Two-Bit for conformity. Why do I fight? I thought, and couldn't think of any real good reason. There isn't any real good reason for fighting except self-defense.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Fun #Real #Pride

I like having a private name and a public name. It helps keep things straight.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Names #Helping

the person in this picture is really me.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Persons

If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky
-- S. E. Hinton

#Friendship #Good Friend #Two Friends

I was a tomboy and most of my close friends were male.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Males #Close Friends

You know what the crummiest feeling you can have is? To hate the person you love the best in the world.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Hate #Feelings #World

We had played a kid's version of gang fighting called "Civil War," and then later we had got in on the real thing, we fought with chains and we fought barefisted and we fought Socs and we fought other grease gangs. It was a normal childhood.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Real #War #Kids

It's okay. We aren't in the same class. Just don't forget that some of us watch the sunset too.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Sunset #Class #Watches

You get tough like me and you don't get hurt. You look out for yourself and nothin' can touch you...
-- S. E. Hinton

#Hurt #Looks #Tough

We couldn't get along without him. We needed Johnny as much as he needed the gang. And for the same reason.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Gang #Reason #Needed

Greasers will still be greasers and Socs will still be Socs. Sometimes I think it's the ones in the middle that are really the lucky stiffs.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Thinking #Lucky #Sometimes

Dally was so real he scared me.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Real #Scared

I gotta cut smoking or I'll never make track next year
-- S. E. Hinton

#Cutting #Years #Track

I guess I just couldn't see standing there -- alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being -- one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn't the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain't the same.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Thinking #Talking #Breathing

Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Gold

let's do it for Johnny
-- S. E. Hinton

#Outsiders

Even the most primite societies have an innate resepect for the insane.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Insane

why do you like fights Darry~Ponyboy He just likes to show off his muscles~Sodapop
-- S. E. Hinton

#Fighting #Likes #Shows

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Writing #Ideas #Imagination

I don't know why I go to school unless for kicks, oh well might as well do dissect a frog.
-- S. E. Hinton

#School #Might #Frogs

Writer's were supposed to be a litte crazy
-- S. E. Hinton

#Crazy

...but I've never regretted it. You can't regret experience.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Regret

Mace, you never read Smoky the Cowhorse,did you? No. Well,ol' Smoky, he had somebad things happen to him,had the heart knocked clean out of him.But he hung on and came out of it okay.I've been bashed up pretty good,Mason, but I'm going to make it.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Heart #Masons #Okay

Get smart and nothing can touch you.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Smart

They shouldn't hate each other . . . I don't hate the Socs any more . . . they shouldn't hate . . .
-- S. E. Hinton

#Hate #Socs

Okay greasers,you've had it.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Okay

My mother was physically and emotionally abusive. My father was an extremely cold man.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Mother #Father #Men

All my life I wanted somebody who knew more than I did to tell me the truth.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Tell Me The Truth #Wanted

You know the rules. No jazz before a rumble.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Jazz #Rumble

I think that The Outsiders was meant to be written, and I was just picked to write it.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Writing #Thinking #Outsiders

Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Stars #Believe #Sunset

Sometimes, I feel like I spent the first part of my life wishing to be a teen-age boy, and the second part condemned to being one.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Boys #Age #Wish

Y'all were heroes from the beginning. You just didn't 'turn' all of a sudden
-- S. E. Hinton

#Hero #Turns

He sure put things into words good.
-- S. E. Hinton

They used to be buddies, I thought, they used to be friends, and now they hate each other because one has to work for a living and the other comes from the West Side. They shouldn't hate each other...
-- S. E. Hinton

#Hate #West #Sides

I've been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you're gold when you're a kid, like green. When you're a kid everything's new, dawn. It's just when you get used to everything that it's day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That's gold. Keep that way, it's a good way to be.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Sunset #Kids #Thinking

You take up for your buddies, no matter what they do. When you're a gang, you stick up for the members. If you don't stick up for them, stick together, make like brothers, it isn't a gang anymore. It's a pack. A snarling, distrustful, bickering park like the Socs in their social clubs or the street gangs in New York or the wolves in the timber.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Brother #New York #Together

What's the safest thing to be when one is met by a gang of social outcasts in an alley? ...No, another social outcast!
-- S. E. Hinton

#Gang #Outcast #Social

...people get hurt in rumbles, maybe killed. I'm sick of it because it doesn't do any good. You can't win...even if you whip us. You'll still be where you were before- at the bottom. And we'll still be the lucky ones with all the breaks. So it doesn't do any good, the fighting and the killing. It doesn't prove a thing.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Hurt #Fighting #Winning

Things were rough all over, but it was better that way. That way you could tell the other guy was human too.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Guy #Way #Rough

That's why people don't ever think to blame the Socs and are always ready to jump on us. We look hoody and they look decent. It could be just the other way around - half of the hoods I know are pretty decent guys underneath all that grease, and from what I've heard, a lot of Socs are just cold-blooded mean - but people usually go by looks.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Mean #Thinking #People

Your mother is not crazy. Neither, contrary to popular belief, is your brother. He is merely miscast in a play. He would have made the perfect knight in a different century, or a very good pagan prince in a time of heroes. He was born in the wrong era, on the wrong side of the river, with the ability to do anything and finding nothing he wants to do.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Mother #Brother #Crazy

You know a guy a longtime, and I mean really know him, you don't get used to the idea that he's dead just overnight.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Mean #Ideas #Guy

He died violent and young and desperate, just like we all knew he'd die someday.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Desperate #Someday #Violent

Some are going, some are staying....i'm in between.
-- S. E. Hinton

California is like a beautiful wild kid on heroin, high as a kite and thinking she's on top of the world, not knowing she's dying, not believing it even if you show her the marks.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Beautiful #Believe #Kids

... Hey, I didn't know you didn't like baloney." I went cold. "I don't like it. I never liked it." Soda just looked at me. "You used to eat it. That's why you wouldn't eat anything while you were sick. You kept saying you didn't like baloney, no matter what it was we were trying to get you to eat." "I don't like it," I repeated.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Sick #Trying #Soda

I didn't think much about that statement then. But later I would-I still do. I think about it and think about it until I think I'm going crazy.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Crazy #Thinking #Going Crazy

I wish I was a kid again, when I had all the answers.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Kids #Wish #Answers

It ain't fair that we have all the rough breaks!
-- S. E. Hinton

#Break #Rough

If you want to be a writer, I have two pieces of advice. One is to be a reader. I think that's one of the most important parts of learning to write. The other piece of advice is 'Just do it!' Don't think about it, don't agonize, sit down and write.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Writing #Thinking #Two

If you enjoy reading something, read it.
-- S. E. Hinton

#Reading #Enjoy

Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep.
-- S. E. Hinton

#People