Leo Borlock Quotes

“She did not seem to notice. Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things did not stick to her. Our bad things stuck very much to her . . . All of her feelings, all of her attentions flowed outward. She had no ego.”

“She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school. In her answers in class, she often spoke of sea horses and stars, but she did not know what a football was . . .”

″She was different. Different. We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against. She was unknown territory. Unsafe. We were afraid to get too close.”

“Ironically, as we discovered and distinguished ourselves, a new collective came into being—a vitality, a presence, a spirit that had not been there before.”

“She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.”

We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past “weird” and “strange” and “goofy.” Her ways knocked us off balance.”

“I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence.”

“Hillari Kimble walked up to Stargirl and said, ‘You ruin everything.’ And she slapped her. The crowd grew instantly still. The two girls stood facing each other for a long minute. Those nearby saw in Hillari’s shoulders and eyes a flinching: she was waiting to be struck in reply. And in fact, when Stargirl finally moved, Hillari winced and shut her eyes. But it was lips that touched her, not the palm of a hand. Stargirl kissed her gently on the cheek. She was gone by the time Hillari opened her eyes.”

“The family section ran a regular feature about kids on their birthdays, and my mother had called in some info. The last sentence read: ‘As a hobby, Leo Borlock collects porcupine neckties.‘”