--A Step from Heaven by An Na
“Her forehead bunches up like crinkled paper and her eyes squeeze shut in the corners. She does not understand the English that sounds perfect in my head and then comes out messy as the can of spaghetti Uhmma lets me eat on Saturdays if I help with the laundry.”
--A Step from Heaven by An Na
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“Mi Gook. This is a magic word. It can make Uhmma and Apa stop fighting like some important person is knocking on the door.”
--A Step from Heaven by An Na “You couldn’t really tell about Mama’s brain just from looking at her, but it was obvious as soon as she spoke. She had a very high voice, like a little girl, and she only knew twenty-three words. I know this for a fact because we kept a list of the things Mama said tacked to the inside of the kitchen cabinet. Most of the words were common ones, like good and more and hot, but there was one word only my mother said, soof.”
--So B. It by Sarah Weeks “When she asks about brothers and sisters, I stare down at our hands—at all of our hands, white gloves pulled tight and flawless over our fingers—and all I think about is Will and the blood everywhere the last time I saw him. I remember watching from my window as Donny George stood with a hose in his backyard, rinsing the blood from his kids’ swing set, spraying down the concrete walkway in his yard. It took him forever. As I’m thinking about it, I can feel my shin aching where I fell on the cinderblocks in the Georges’ yard and took a chunk out of my flesh. The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. ‘I had a brother,’ I say.”
--Breathless by Jessica Warman “Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get—a cold, sick feeling deep down inside—when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the same person you were.”
--A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly “Yet that’s not the worst danger of being a liar. Oh no. Much worse than discovery, than their sense of betrayal, is when you start to believe your own lies. When it all blurs together. You lose track of what’s real and what’s not. You start to feel as if you make the world with your words. Your lies get stranger and weirder and denser, get bigger than words, turn into worlds, become real. You feel powerful, invincible.”
--Liar by Justine Larbalestier “She concentrated, repeating the rules and warnings in her mind like a prayer, a litany to keep her focused. Don’t stare, don’t speak, don’t run, don’t touch. She took several calming breaths. Don’t react. Don’t attract their attention. Don’t ever let them know you can see them. The familiarity of the words helped her push back the edge of desire, but it wasn’t enough to make it anywhere near comfortable to be around him.”
--Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr “This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.”
--Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson “You don’t understand, my headvoice answers. Too bad she can’t hear it. My throat squeezes shut, as if two hands of black fingernails are clamped on my windpipe. I have worked so hard to forget every second of that stupid party, and here I am in the middle of a hostile crowd that hates me for what I had to do. I can’t tell them what really happened. I can’t even look at that part myself.”
--Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson "Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of."
--The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams |