Eleanor & Park Quotes

“Not just new—but big and awkward. With crazy hair, bright red on top of curly. And she was dressed like… like she wanted people to look at her. Or maybe like she didn’t get what a mess she was… Like something that wouldn’t survive in the wild.”

“When Eleanor was a little girl, she’d thought her mom looked like a queen, like the star of some fairy tale […] You’d look at Eleanor’s mom and think she must be carved into the prow of a Viking ship somewhere or maybe painted on the side of a plane […]”

″‘If you don’t want people to look at you,’ Park had thought at the time, ‘don’t wear fishing lures in your hair.‘”

“If this had happened two summers ago, Eleanor would have run and banged on the door herself. She would have yelled at Richie to stop. She would have called 911 at the very, very least. But now that seemed like something a child would do, or a fool.”

“She pulled it out of the way and started to say sorry—but it was that stupid Asian kid, and he frowned when he saw that it was her.”

″‘I told him you were ready to be part of this family.’ ‘I’m ‘already’ part of this family. I’m like a charter member.‘”

“He looked exactly like a rat. Like the human being version of a rat […] Who knew what her mom saw in him; Eleanor’s dad was messed-up looking, too.”

″‘And you look like a protagonist.’ She was talking as fast as she could think. ‘You look like a person who wins in the end. You’re so pretty, and so good. You have magic eyes,’ she whispered.”

“Eleanor was right: She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

″‘Smarter than I ever was,’ her mom said. ‘And braver. I haven’t been on my own since the eighth grade.‘”

“He did have really cute hair. Really, really… It was completely straight and almost completely black, which, on Park, seemed like a lifestyle choice. He always wore black, practically head to toe.”

″‘I’m ending this.’ ‘No. Come on. It’s not worth it.’ ‘You are,’ he said fiercely, looking at her. ‘You’re worth it.‘”

“But when Eleanor walked in the house, it was like her siblings didn’t recognize her.”

“She told herself that Park’s family must be decent people because they’d raised a person like Park. Never mind that this principle didn’t hold true in her own family.”

“There were moments—not just today, moments every day since they’d met—when Eleanor made him self-conscious, when he saw people talking and he was sure they were talking about them. Raucous moments on the bus when he was sure that everyone was laughing at them.”

“It wouldn’t do any good to tell him that she hadn’t been that girl at her old school. Yeah, she’d been made fun of before. There were always mean boys—and there were always, always mean girls—but she’d had friends at her old school.”

″‘That’s not what I meant, though. I meant… that you’re different from the other people in the neighborhood, you know?’ Of course he knew. They’d all been telling him so his whole life.”

″‘I hate meeting new people,’ she whispered. ‘Why?’ ‘Because they never like me.‘”

“His dad barreled into the kitchen and scooped his mom into his arms. They did this every night, too. Full-on make-out sessions, no matter who was around.”

“Park touched her hands like they were something rare and precious, like her fingers were intimately connected to the rest of her body. Which, of course, they were. It was hard to explain. He made her feel like more than the sum of her parts.”