“She looks sad. She looks angry. She looks different from everyone else I know—she cannot put on that happy face others wear when they know they are being watched. She doesn’t put on a face for me, which makes me trust her somehow.”
“There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented—whatever captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention.”
“Almost everybody in the world gets married,—you know what I mean? In our town there aren’t hardly any exceptions. Most everybody in the world climbs into their graves married.”
“Everyone wanted to believe that endless love was possible. She’d believed in it once too, back when she was eighteen. But she knew that love was messy, just like life”
“I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation. I can view everyone as pieces of a whole, and focus on the whole, not the pieces.”
When J.J.’s mother reveals that she wants more time for her birthday, J.J. decides to go and find some. A task, at first, that seems like an impossible undertaking for a fifteen-year-old. That is until a neighbor shows J.J. an unlikely place to look for everyone’s lost time.
Honor Brown hates, absolutely hates school. It’s horrible--there are monsters and petrifying teachers. The students are crooks and pirates and everyone is so mean! They throw them out of windows and make them walk on glass. It’s so, so horrible, but what happens when it’s over?
“But the next thing that I knew, I was following a Nowhere Hunch, a real dumb thing to do! Everybody sometimes does it. Even me. And even you. I followed him in circles till we wore the rug right through. ”
“At lunchtime in the school yard, to his friends he was still plain and ordinary, ‘Max’... Well, not quite ordinary. But then as Aaron said, ‘Everyone’s different in some way, aren’t they?’ ”
Henry always felt out of step with the world around him. When everyone looked up, he looked down. If he thought it was going to be a sunny day, it usually rained.
Halinka’s attempts to stay strong and find some joy in her Spartan existence ring true. At first she stays aloof from everyone, keeping her thoughts and inside her head and sharing them only with her secret book and a beloved aunt whom she occasionally visits.
“Yet I could not help worrying. The thought of losing either of them was unbearable. If something bad happened on the cay, I wanted it to happen to all of us.”
“Everyone says Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and despite the fact that Wilfrid doesn’t even know what a memory is, by accident he helps her find it.”