Laurie Halse Anderson: Doing

“Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?”

“What do I want?
The answer to that question does not exist.”

“This is where you can find your soul if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you've never dared look at before. Do not come here and ask me to show you how to draw a face. Ask me to help you find the wind.”

“I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.”

“Do they choose to be so dense? Were they born that way? I have no friends. I have nothing. I say nothing. I am nothing.”

“Sometimes being an adult means doing the right thing, even if it's not what you want.”

“I am so sorry. I wish you knew even one tenth of one percent of how sorry I am…. It was my fault. Can I kill myself here, or should I do it outside, so the mess on your carpet doesn't upset your mother?”

“When life sucks, read. They can't yell at you for that. And if they do, then you can ignore them.”

“Do you know how much women loathe it when guys think every show of negative emotion is tied to our menstrual cycle, like we're sheep or something?”

“I scared myself, because once you've thought long and hard enough about doing something that is colossally stupid, you feel like you've actually done it, and then you're never quite sure what your limits are.”

“I keep thinking that if I could just unzip my skin, step out of this body, then I would see who I really am.“ She nods her head slowly. „What do you think you‘d look like?” “Smaller, for a start.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing in the next five minutes and she has the next ten years figured out. I’ll worry about making it out of ninth grade alive. Then I’ll think about a career path.”