Jeffrey Lionel Magee Quotes

“If anybody could survive on the loose, it would be this kid who showed up from Hollidaysburg. Who slept on floors. Who outran dogs.”

“Maniac told him the story of his parents’ death. He told about his problem with the trestle, how he had learned to avoid it. “And then, all of a sudden, there I was, on the platform, looking out at it, closer to it than I ever was before, up on the same level. I always saw it from below before. Now I was up there, too, where they were, looking down, and it was more real than ever. The nightmare was worse than ever. I saw the trolley coming ... I saw it...f-falling...them...them...” They walked in silence past the silo-shaped cage of the broken-winged golden eagle. Mars Bar swallowed hard. His voice was hoarse. ‘I knew you wasn’t scared.″

“I am not asking you. I’m telling you. You are coming home with me, and you are going to sleep in my room, which is going to be your room—and I don’t care if you sleep on the floor or the windowsill or what—but you are going to sleep there and not here.”

“Maniac felt why more than he knew why. It had to do with homes and families and schools, and how a school seems sort of like a big home, but only a day home, because then it empties out; and you can’t stay there at night because it’s not really a home and you could never use it as your address, because an address is where you stay at night, where you walk right in the front door without knocking, where everybody talks to each other and uses the same toaster. So all the other kids would be heading for their homes, their night homes, each of them, hundreds, flocking from school like birds form a tree, scattering across town, each breaking off to his or her own place, each knowing exactly where to land. School. Home. No, he was not going to have one without the other. ”

“But the voice of the buffalo was the voice of Amanda Beale, and its teeth were her fingers pulling and wrenching his poor ear till he was sitting upright.”

“When he wasn’t reading, he was wandering. When most people wander, they walk. Maniac Magee ran. Around town, around the nearby townships, always carrying the book, keeping it in perfect condition.”

“Dead silence along the street. The kid had done the unthinkable, he had chomped on one of Mars’s own bars. Not only that, but white kids just didn’t put their mouths where black kids had had theirs, be it soda bottles, spoons, or candy bars. And the kid hadn’t even gone for the unused end; he had chomped right over Mars Bar’s own bite marks.”

“Out-numbered, out-weighed, but not out-hearted. That’s when Maniac felt it—pride, for this East End warrior whom Maniac could feel trembling in his arms, scared as any normal kid would be, but not showing it to them. Yeah, you’re bad all right, Mars Bar. You’re more than bad. You’re good. ”

“Maniac smiled. “We can fix it.” The way he said it, she believed. “Want to come to my house?” she said. “Sure,” he said.”

“If anybody could survive on the loose, it would be this kid who showed up from Hollidaysburg. Who slept on floors. Who outran dogs.”

″‘If you try to make me,’ he said, ‘I’ll just start running.‘”

“He knew that finally, truly, at long last, someone was calling him home.”