Robin Wasserman Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 75 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robin Wasserman.
Famous Quotes By Robin Wasserman
One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often won't tell you- because they've got their own agendas, or because they want to shield you from the hard truths "for your own good." Adults lie, they betray, they screw up in every way possible ... — Robin Wasserman
It's significantly more satisfying to kick a wall than it is to kick thin air. For the rebellious teen- or the teen who wants to feel like a rebel- a clearly defined law gives you something to define yourself against. — Robin Wasserman
The chemicals were both highly flammable and highly toxic, and more than one inexpert bust had ended in conflagration. — Robin Wasserman
Nor did I need anyone's pity, but I would accept it with grace, because I have been well trained. Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the powere to accept anything and move on. — Robin Wasserman
Instead of inventing imaginary friends, I invented whole imaginary worlds. They were elaborate scenarios about spies and adventurers and top secret missions. I crawled along my swing set, searching for escape routes from my maximum-security prison; I biked through the neighborhood, the wind in my hair and a fleet of evildoers on my heels. — Robin Wasserman
Sascha looked torn. Should she cram my head full of newfound terror that the world would reject me, or let me wander into the big, scary out-there, like a naive lamb prancing to the slaughter? — Robin Wasserman
You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after. — Robin Wasserman
I spent most of my teen years trying to figure out the rules of life, theories for why things happened, why people behaved as they did, and mostly I came to the conclusion that either there were no rules, or the rules sucked. Reading science fiction wasn't about imagining myself into some more exciting life filled with adventure, it was about finding a world where things worked the way I wanted them to. — Robin Wasserman
I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen.
But maybe that particular delusion was universal. — Robin Wasserman
Origin stories are irrelevant. Nothing matters less than how you were born. What matters is how you die, and how you live. We live for each other, so anything that got us to that point must have been right. — Robin Wasserman
You tell me, Dex, what kind of a bullshit god doesn't care what you did or who you hurt as long as you say you're sorry? Forgiveness — Robin Wasserman
It was almost a relief, no longer having to be extraordinary. To give up on existential questioning and simply abide. — Robin Wasserman
I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted. — Robin Wasserman
Nobody likes me," he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest.
"Can't imagine why," Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough,
which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that
I didn't have any lungs. — Robin Wasserman
And you know what? If there is a God, and it's that same God who's so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can't get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some. — Robin Wasserman
That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else's words in a voice that somehow was and wasn't your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but-as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it-words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefor I am. — Robin Wasserman
Rudeness was a sign of weakness. Grace stemmed from power, the power to accept anything and move on. — Robin Wasserman
They wanted their girls to be safe. To do what they had to do to conform, to defer, to survive, to grow up. They wanted their girls never to grow up. Never to stop burning. They wanted their girls to say fuck it, to see through the lies, to know their own strength. They wanted their girls to believe the things could be different this time, and they wanted it to be true.
They wondered, sometimes, if they'd made a mistake. If it was dangerous, taming the wild, stealing away the words a girl might use to name her secret self. They wondered at the consequences of teaching a girl she was weak instead of warning her she was strong. They wondered, if knowing was power, what happened to power that refused to know itself; they wondered what happened that couldn't be satisfied, to pain that couldn't be felt, a rage that couldn't be spoken. — Robin Wasserman
When I was a kid I used to wonder if, just maybe, the world existed only for me. If rooms ceased to exist when I stepped into the hallway and people disappeared once they left me, the rest of their lives imagined solely for my entertainment. — Robin Wasserman
Popularity gives you power only over people who care about being popular. Ostracism gives you power only over those who fear being ostracized. — Robin Wasserman
Even now, I believe that to know how is useless if we do not know why. And there are too many who forbid us to ask. — Robin Wasserman
Cliche but accurate: Kick a football, then ask it whether it meant to fly. All action demands an equal and opposite reaction. You can't blame an object battered by inertial forces; you can't blame me, bouncing through the pinball machine of life. — Robin Wasserman
You could love something and still understand it had ruined your life. — Robin Wasserman
They would fade away-and I would be left alone to face the people at school,and the reporters,and Adriane,and all the places where Max had taken my hand or breathed in my ear or told me he loved me,and the emptiness that used to be Chris. — Robin Wasserman
Girls had to believe in anything but their own power, because if girls knew what they could do, imagine what they might. — Robin Wasserman
As someone who writes and teaches YA fiction, I spend a lot of time trying to define its character and readership, and I don't think I'm alone - genres are all about boundary drawing, and the YA genre is, in a lot of ways, about carving out boundaries around adolescence, a space for teenagers to do teenage things. — Robin Wasserman
Teen fiction should be about teenagers - no matter how many arguments there are about what YA lit should be, this seems like the one thing we can all agree on. — Robin Wasserman
They had battled and bloodied one another, they had kept secrets, broken hearts, lied, betrayed, exiled, they had walked away, said goodbye and sworn it was forever, and somehow, every time, they had mended, they had forgiven, they had survived. Some mistakes could never be fixed - some, but not all. Some people can't be driven away, no matter how hard you try. Some friendships won't break. — Robin Wasserman
Don't go looking in dark places, because dark things live there. — Robin Wasserman
They were kids. Kids don't care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedliky. It's home. They didn't notice the tanks in the backyard, the blood in the streets. — Robin Wasserman
'The Waking Dark' is about what happens when something awakens a town's darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world. — Robin Wasserman
Sort of pregnant. Sort of dead. Sort of Jewish. These are impossibles. — Robin Wasserman
Stevens, who knew that mouth could do more thana rgue? You're a true blue friend, a red-hot lady and all that other good yearbook shit. You've got a big heart and I've got an even bigger...you know. So we're both winners. KG — Robin Wasserman
Of course Stephen King doesn't believe in teen novels. I've started to suspect he doesn't even believe in teenagers. — Robin Wasserman
The doctor's voice was cold. "There's nothing to put back. There's no body to go back to. The body of Lia Kahn is dead. Be grateful you didn't die with it. — Robin Wasserman
Our story ends happily ever after. It has to. We escape Battle Creek, pile into the car, and burn a strip of rubber down the highway. Fly away west, to the promised land. Our rooms will be lit by lava lamps and Christmas lights. Our lives will glow. Consciousness will rise and minds will expand, and beautiful boys in flannel shirts will make snow angels on our floor and write love letters on our ceiling with black polish and red lipstick. We will be their muses, and they will strum their guitars beneath our window, calling to us with a siren song. Come down come away with me. We will lean out of our tower, our hair swinging like Rapunzel's, and laugh, because nothing will carry us away from each other. — Robin Wasserman
I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down. — Robin Wasserman
The love you needed was the kind best avoided. — Robin Wasserman
She felt, at times, that what had seemed like an infinity of choice turned out to be a funnel, life narrowing itself one bad decision at a time, each mistake cutting the options by half, spiraling her ever downward until there was nowhere left to fall but into a small, dark hole that had no bottom. Choosing — Robin Wasserman
I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments — Robin Wasserman
Like when everything flipped upside down and the scream of metal on metal exploded the silence and the world churned around me, ground over sky over ground over sky, and then, with a thunderous crack and a crunching of glass and steel, a twisted roof crushing me into a gutted floor, ground, I wasn't surprised. — Robin Wasserman
No matter how terrifying, they need to decide that the only rules that matter are the ones they write themselves. — Robin Wasserman
As last days go, mine sucked. The last day I would have chosen - the last day I deserved - would have involved more chocolate. — Robin Wasserman
I did it all mechanically. Mechanically, as in without thought, as in through force of habit, as in instinctively, automatically, involuntarily. Mechanically, as in like-a-machine. — Robin Wasserman
They ask how the universe is arranged, philosophers, mathematicians, and they draw pretty pictures, impossibilities on the page. They save phenomena by telling one ugly lie after another, epicycles upon epicycles, and the fools care not. It is not enough, I tell you, to ask how the cosmos is designed. We must ask why. — Robin Wasserman
Loretta didn't have much time left for mothering, and once I was old enough to fry my own eggs, she started leaving me home with the cat. Then the cat ran away; she didn't notice. Poor — Robin Wasserman
See, wrong guys think they're good. Evil guys don't think at all. They're just evil. And kind of lame. So whick are you? — Robin Wasserman
Which is to say, I'd been lonely for so long, I'd forgotten that I was.
That feeling of disconnection, of grief for something I'd never had, of screaming into a void and knowing no one would hear me
I'd forgotten that was anything other than the basic condition of life. — Robin Wasserman
But things don't just fall apart. People break them. — Robin Wasserman
In my room, in the dark, I understood what I never had before, what no one else seemed to. I understood how a boy could go into the woods with a bullet and a gun and not come out. That there was no conspiracy, no evil influences or secret rituals; that sometimes there was only pain and the need to make it stop. — Robin Wasserman
I guess that's the secret. It would never have occurred to Lia to want to escape
but then she gets kicked out. Best thing that ever happened to her? I'm not sure she would say yes, because obliviousness tends to be rather pleasant, but once you realized you've been bolivious, there's no turning back. You can't un-know what you know.
You know? — Robin Wasserman
I envied Elizabeth- but I admired Groot. Because if you truly believed in the lightning bolts, why not do everything in your power to take them for yourself. — Robin Wasserman
Eli: 'If a machine like that really existed, people would be willing to kill for it. Lots of people.'
Nora: 'Yeah, and if hot vampires really existed, suicide would be a viable option for wrinkle prevention. Your point? — Robin Wasserman
In dreams you can become everything you're not. You can reverse the most fundamental truths of your life. You can taste death, the ultimate opposite. — Robin Wasserman
Life is both a particle and a wave, Lacey taught me, and also it's neither. But only when no one is watching. Once you measure it, it has to choose. It was the act of witnessing that turned nothing into something, collapsed possibility clouds into concrete and irrevocable truth. I'd only pretended to understand before, but I understood now: When no one was watching, I was a cloud. I was all possibilities. — Robin Wasserman
The world was full of weapons, when you cared to look. — Robin Wasserman
Hacking in its pure form stretched back centuries. It wasn't restricted to a single medium. It was more than a methodology. It was an ethos. — Robin Wasserman
I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean. — Robin Wasserman
I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire. — Robin Wasserman
I told myself I deserved some good luck, overlooking the fact that it would call for substantially more than luck to thrust me into one of those narratives where plain-Jane new girl catches the eye of inexplicably single Prince Charming, because somehow the new school has revealed her wild, irresistible beauty, of which she was never before aware. — Robin Wasserman
Eli shouted my name, and then his arounds were around me, and I reached for Adriane who held fast to a blistering, burning creature that once had been Max and somehow still breathed and stood and howled. Though he was now nothing but flame, a golem of fire, that lived only because he'd forgotten how to die. — Robin Wasserman
People do crazy things when they're keeping girls locked up in their shed. — Robin Wasserman
There had to be consequences. Lacey was always right about that. Maybe freaks stayed freaks and losers stayed losers, maybe sad and weak was forever, but villains only stayed villains until someone stopped them. — Robin Wasserman
Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time. — Robin Wasserman
For me, the teen years were all about searching for a place for myself, wondering why I seemed so different than everyone else, wondering especially why no one could look past the surface and figure out who I really was underneath. — Robin Wasserman
Full Disclosure: I hate David with the passion of a thousand fiery suns all going to supernova at the same time — Robin Wasserman
There are some moments you'd rather sleep through, pass from point A to point B without awareness of the time passing or the events that carry you from present to future. And it's mostly those moments in which it's smarter-safer- to stay awake. — Robin Wasserman
A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else. — Robin Wasserman
Just because you can't take something back, doesn't mean you don't want to. Just because you want to, doesn't mean you try. — Robin Wasserman
Since I was dead - or worse than dead, buried alive in a body that might as well be a coffin except it denied me the pleasure of suffocation - I figured I should be allowed to grieve. — Robin Wasserman
Not that my arms are getting tired or anything, but ... how much longer is the hugging phase going to last? — Robin Wasserman
The world was so much more forgiving of strength when it took on the appearance of weakness. — Robin Wasserman