Lynne Rae Perkins Quotes & Sayings

I thought Marie could handle whatever came along. I thought of her as someone who did whatever she wanted to. That's what she would have said. She skipped school a lot, and when she did come, no one seemed to care what she did. The principals and teachers at school had already given up on Marie. They hardly even saw her, except as some kind of blemish. She could have stood on her head wearing a burlap bag, and nobody would have noticed all that much. They thought she was stupid. She wasn't stupid. — Lynne Rae Perkins

I felt ten years old and a thousand years old, but I didn't know how to be my own age. I had never felt that way before, but now I feel like that a lot. — Lynne Rae Perkins

They looked for one another when nothing else was happening, the way you pick up a magazine or look in the cupboard for a snack. Not exactly by accident and not exactly on purpose. You could go out in the world and do new things and meet new people, and then you could come home and just sit on the stoop with someone you had never not known, and watch lightning bugs blink on and off. — Lynne Rae Perkins

Step and land, step and land. That's all travel was. Throw in some running and a change of scenery. No big deal, right? And so, off he went. Off they went together. — Lynne Rae Perkins

Whatever her name was, she was pretty. She had a thick, careless braid of chestnut hair, a quick smile, and dark, merry eyes. She wore some kind of a fuzzy lavender pullover, and when she crossed her legs and lifted her guitar onto her lap, she had an interesting way of tucking the foot of the bottom leg back under her chair that made Hector feel melty. He looked away in self-preservation. — Lynne Rae Perkins

His fingertips lightly and unintentionally grazed her face and her ears, and Debbie's don't-get-in-trouble self felt itself making room for her alert-alert-something-new-is-happening self. — Lynne Rae Perkins

A good story makes a journey go by more quickly. A really good story makes you forget you are even on a journey. — Lynne Rae Perkins

He was thinking that maybe love was like starting a fire with two sticks. You've always heard that it's possible, but how likely is it? — Lynne Rae Perkins

Debbie wondered if it was true that there was only one person in the world for every person, and if she had already met him, and she either had to find a way to be around him again someday or always be alone. Romance-wise. She didn't quite believe this. What seemed more likely was that there were at least five or six people scattered around the globe who you could bump into and, wham, it would be the right thing. — Lynne Rae Perkins

My dance on the pedestal was my friendship with Maureen. I wasn't sure how I had lost my balance and fallen off. Or whether I was pushed. Everyone around me was trying to get me to dance again. The thing was, I hadn't quite given up on getting back up there. I still believed it was the only place where I could be happy. — Lynne Rae Perkins

Lenny's face was smiling, too. For a minute they were both ten years old. Time travel in real life. — Lynne Rae Perkins

Many girls at school were infatuated with his shallow athletic splendor and his golden handsome features that were biologically inherited and had nothing to do with the kind of person he might actually be. — Lynne Rae Perkins

She was thinking that the grass really could be greener on the other side of the fence. It depended on who wa standing in the grass. Maybe you had to go take a look — Lynne Rae Perkins

I know I'm still young and there's a lot of time for things to happen, but sometimes I think there is something about me that's wrong, that I'm not the kind of person anyone can fall in love with, and that I'll always just be alone. — Lynne Rae Perkins

The trouble with being too careful about your wishes, though, was that you could end up with a wish so shapeless that it could come true and you wouldn't even know it, or it wouldn't matter. — Lynne Rae Perkins

What can you do? You pick yourself up. You pull yourself together. You move on. — Lynne Rae Perkins

Their secrets inadvertently sidestepped each other, unaware, like blindfolded elephants crossing the tiny room. — Lynne Rae Perkins

This was the danger of sharing your dreams with your parents. If you told them you wanted to learn to play the guitar, all they heard you say was, "I want to learn to play the guitar," and then they found some practical, convenient, cheap way, often involving a church basement, for you to do it. But Hector had not come up with any plan of his own. And owning a guitar seemed like an important stepping stone on the way to being a guitar player. So he pawned his soul and said he would take the lessons from the Presbyterian youth minister. What the hell, he thought. Or heck, he thought. What the heck. — Lynne Rae Perkins

Maybe the grass is greener on the other side depends who was standing in it. Sometimes you have to go over there and look. — Lynne Rae Perkins