Quotes from book

Running with Scissors

“Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.”

“He was raised without a proper diagnosis.”

“Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.”

“It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn't had any cigarettes.”

“What nobody understood then is this: The only way that you achieve what you want and fulfill your dreams and become great is by demanding that sort of attention. You have to make it happen.”

“I did not consider him to be any kind of a genius. I considered him deeply lacking in the area that mattered most in life. Star quality.”

“I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained. She's always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.”

“I missed him so much that I had physical sensations of loss, all over my body. Like one minute I was missing an arm, the next my spleen. It was making me feel sick, like throwing up.”

“Turn off the light," she says as she walks away, creating a smallthat smells sweet and chemical. It makes me sad because it's the smell she makes when she's leaving.”

“I was learning that if I lived slightly in the future-what will happen next-I didn't have to feel so much about what was going on in the present.”

“I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead”

“My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron.”

“But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.”

“You deserve to need me, not to have me.”

“Now I can addto my list of life's accomplishments.”

“I felt deeply tricked. Stunned. And furious. I also felt my default emotion: numbness.”

“The problem with not having anybody to tell you what to do, I understood, is that there was nobody to tell you what not to do.”

“Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when.”

“I couldn't help but think, This car is taking me to a mental hospital and my mother is treating it like open-mic night at a Greenwich Village café.”