Quotes & Sayings About Headphones

The sound in my headphones ceased to exist, but somehow that's when I truly heard everything. — Alexander Engel-Hodgkinson

Girl listens to radio. Girl finds music. Girl has whole other world.

Girl slips on headphones. World gone. — Kathleen Glasgow

My favorite idea is doing an all-night tent show starring my friend's band Marijuana Deathsquads, where everyone would wear super-loud headphones, and there would be tons of subs and lights. It'd be really dope. — Justin Vernon

Years of backseat drives full of noise and sounds that seem random until you're alone in your room with headphones on; so you can truly get the whole picture. — Waldo Austin

London wasn't the first city I'd lived in, but it was certainly the largest. Anywhere else there is always the chance of seeing someone you know or, at the very least, a smiling face. Not here. Commuters crowd the trains, eager to outdo their fellow travelers in an escalating privacy war of paperbacks, headphones and newspapers. A woman next to me on the Northern Line on day held the Metro just inches from her face; it was only three stops later that I noticed she was not reading but crying. It was hard not to offer sympathy and harder still to not start crying myself. — Belle De Jour

Ty was pulling his headphones out of his pocket, bracing his black-sneakered feet just above the top step. 'We're Shadowhunters,' he said. 'We don't run. — Cassandra Clare

Besides, if I wanted to hear people speaking wall-to-wall French, all I had to do was remove my headphones and participate in what is known as 'real life,' a concept as uninviting as a shampoo cocktail. — David Sedaris

Music is so powerful to me. I had my IPod and headphones, and my sad playlist. I kind of ventured off for just a little bit to get into the scene. — Beverley Mitchell

Start Laugh, because this which you will heard will make you laugh. One student from my school today 3.25.2016 - said this
"How many much costs this Headphones?" This sentences it really sucks! — Deyth Banger

Headphones opened up a world of sonic colors, a palette of nuances and details that went far beyond the chords and melody, the lyrics, or a particular singer's voice. The swampy Deep South ambience of "Green River" by Creedence, or the pastoral, open-space beauty of the Beatles' "Mother Nature's Son"; the oboes in Beethoven's Sixth (conducted by Karajan), faint and drenched in the atmosphere of a large wood-and-stone church; the sound was an enveloping experience. — Daniel J. Levitin

He would buy me a pair of headphones if I would promise to use them when he was home. Those headphones forever changed the way I listened to music. — Daniel J. Levitin

STREET by 50 is all about giving our fans the finest music experience we possibly can. The response to the limited edition colors so far speaks for itself - the fans want the opportunity to match their headphones to their personal style, and we definitely want to make sure to give them what they want. — Curtis Jackson

I have these headphones, which pretty much exclude everything else so that you can really completely control the sound that you're hearing. I don't use them very much, I have to say. I very rarely listen on headphones. — Brian Eno

I think Blank Generation holds up pretty well. You listen to that with headphones and there's a lot going on there with the guitars- it's the product of a lot of fighting. — Robert Quine

It's more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he's more than halfway through his plan and he's been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension. — Charles Duhigg

Hadrian held the headphones close to one ear. "What is this, Eden? You're listening to music? Stupid, crappy music?"
The square-jawed man stared blankly at him. "It's Celine Dion, sir."
"Get security up here! I want this man in irons. Prepare the Dark Hole! — Steven Erikson

I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones. — Brian Eno

As a teenager, I would tell the teacher I was sick just so I could lie down in the nurse's office and listen to my headphones, thinking about how that day may be the best day ever, but I'm only capable of acknowledging that from a sickbed, lost in my own world. — Wesley Eisold

Before music videos first came out, you'd listen to a song with headphones on, sitting in a beanbag chair with your eyes closed, and you'd come up with your own visions, these things that came from within. Then all of a sudden, sometimes even the very first time you heard a song, it was with these visual images attached, and it robbed you of any form of self-expression. — Eddie Vedder

She goes on the set with headphones and gives you notes. She's terrific and I always run to her now, because she is just great to work with, as well as very good at different accents. — Albert Finney

When I was a kid I just had headphones on all the time, and it changed the way I see things and the way I interpret things. — Matt Nathanson

Headphones also made the music more personal for me; it was suddenly coming from inside my head, not out there in the world. This — Daniel J. Levitin

You can find me at three in the morning in my living room with a glass of wine and really bad '90s trip hop beats blaring from my headphones. — Jenny Lewis

Too cold even to snow - that winter presents a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowls the static like he used to prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein. A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it. There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot. Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some — Anthony Doerr

I'm always blowing the speakers out in studios, like, there's smoke coming out of them. I found out that I'm not built for studio monitors. I record and mix down everything in the headphones and then I bring it to the speakers. — AraabMuzik

I make my music at night when there's no noise ... Just me, my headphones and the silence. But I'm always making music in my head. It's like a non-stop radio! — Marilou

The guy who sits in front of the TV set with headphones on has lost the capacity to react to the tactile environment. — Peter Eisenman

The Americans fished on, not hoping for much anymore, perhaps for a miracle, searching for small things to be happy about, because they were Americans and this was what their upbringings had taught them to do. They found a brief happiness, for example, in the potato chips that came to their rooms on expensive china and in the genuinely hopeful way the hotel girl asked if they'd had any luck. They took pleasure in their morning calls to the Lufthansa man, his wriggly explanations for the canceled flights to Norway. They smiled at the way a church had been built so the setting sun hit it high and perfect and orange, and the way they could follow the river to a park where miniskirted women lay in the grass with headphones clamped over their ears, and even at the way the little student-girls came filing down at noon behind their English-teaching beauty to call them fools. — Anthony Doerr

I didn't bring my headphones, I'd watched the two movies they had played and I was just like, 'Can we please find a donor that wants to give us a private jet? This is not Okay.' — Cat Osterman

They ignored her because of their headphones, a thousand people marching to fifteen hundred different drummers, effectively secluded but for a very basic instinct not to bump into one another. Those that were unplugged rushed from place to place and were never actually anywhere other than somewhere else. — Thomm Quackenbush

I play the piano. I bought an upright piano that is actually electric, so I can practice my scales with headphones on and not make my neighbours' lives hell! — Eva Green

Private listening really took off in 1979, with the popularity of the Walkman portable cassette player. Listening to music on a Walkman is a variation of the "sitting very still in a concert hall" experience (there are no acoustic distractions), combined with the virtual space (achieved by adding reverb and echo to the vocals and instruments) that studio recording allows. With headphones on, you can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety, and the lack of uncontrollable reverb inherent in hearing music in a live room means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact; it doesn't get blurred or turned into sonic mush as it often does in a concert hall. You, and only you, the audience of one, can hear a million tiny details, even with the compression that MP3 technology adds to recordings. You can hear the singer's breath intake, their fingers on a guitar string. That said, extreme and sudden dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. As — David Byrne

The first time I went to Abbey Road and put those headphones on, I discovered I had two voices. I no longer had to shout in the studio, but I can't knock the Cavern or the other clubs because they gave me my strong voice. — Cilla Black

I was listening to this playlist I'd made for her, headphones clamped over my ears. It was the story of us in music, except it wasn't finished yet. I had this plan that I'd add a new song every month, so that the playlist would keep going as long as we did. It was sort of an electronic version of adopting a tree, which I'd done in the Carbon Footprint Awareness Club, but only because it had looked good, not because I'd actually wanted to. Keeping a playlist alive sounded much more me. — Robyn Schneider

I think it's pretty dynamic. There's a lot of energy there and life, and you'll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they're listening in Spanish. — Michael Emerson

Since the truth may not be what we would prefer. It is revealing that so many people today express approval by saying, "I'm comfortable with that," and disapproval by saying, "I'm not comfortable with that." Comfort is important when it comes to furniture and headphones, but it is irrelevant when it comes to truth. — Douglas Groothuis

Sometimes as I laid there with my Walkman and headphones, I'd stare at the closed door and know she was just across the hall. What was she doing? — Cambria Hebert

They all nodded. A favorite game in quarry had been based on a highly successful film series with lasers, robots, and a princess who wore her hair like a pair of stereo headphones. (It had been agreed without a word being said that if anyone was going to play the part of any stupid princesses, it wasn't going to be Pepper.) But the game normally ended in a fight to be the one who was allowed to to wear the coal scuttle and blow up planets. — Terry Pratchett

You've spent half of your life
Trying to fall behind
You're using your headphones
Just to drown out your mind. — Regina Spektor

One of my favorite things to do is put my headphones on,blast some good music and just walk my own personal music video — Donal O'Callaghan

My breathing begins to slow. The tension in my muscles starts to relax.
Then, a click in the headphones. A slow breath of air.
I open my eyes to bright moonlight.
And Hannah, with warmth.
Thank you. — Jay Asher

Shane sat like a statue if a statue wore headphones and radiated angry coiled tension that made hair stand up on a person's arms. She felt like she was sitting next to an unexploded bomb, and given all of the physics she'd had, she understood what that meant. Talk about potential energy. — Rachel Caine

Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead. — George Packer

When I fly, I never check my bags. I bring a carry-on, an eye pillow, noise-canceling headphones, a big pillow and a blanket. — Nina Dobrev

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he's the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. — Richard Feynman

I am YOUR biggest fan, I love each one of you because of the support that you took to me. I know that people been saying that I do this for money, but I really don't. I do this for YOU, for your loyalty, for everything you've done, you are doing and you'll do in my life. Music has been my whole life since I was 4 years old, but you turned it into a whole experience of happiness. I know that I am not perfect, and maybe I don't worth it to put on your headphones and listen to this 14-years-old wannabe, full of ego and that brag about almost everything, but it's not about that, it's about you — Maat Morrison

There was another pause, and Gansey realized she'd hung up. He leaned back against the fridge, eyes closed, guilty, comforted, wild, contained. In twenty-four hours, he'd be waiting for this again.
You know better you know better you know better
"What the hell, man?" Ronan said.
Gansey's eyes flew open just as Ronan hit the lights. He stood in the doorway, headphones looped around his neck, Chainsaw hulking like a tender thug on his shoulder. Ronan's eyes found the phone by Gansey's leg, but he didn't ask, and Gansey didn't say anything. Ronan would hear a lie in a second, and the truth wasn't an option. Jealousy had ruined Ronan for the first several months of Adam's introduction into their group; this would hurt him more than that. — Maggie Stiefvater

There's very little about being in a functional-M.R.I. scanner that is natural: you are flat on your back, absolutely still, with your head immobilized by pillows and straps. The scanner makes a dreadful din, which headphones barely muffle. — Robin Marantz Henig

I don't want comedy to be Bridesmaids 2. I'm not denigrating Bridesmaids but, enough already, let's stop pretending women are incalculably different to us. Seeking out podcasts, listening on headphones, it's like an intimate, specific conversation. People respond if it feels from the heart. I'm as neurotic a human being as lives, and I have my faults. I'm a drunk. But people really like that. — Greg Proops

Where once such devices were relegated to appropriate times, now they've become necessities. The other day I watched a kid come off the school bus listening to music on his headphones, oblivious to the traffic zooming past him. And I can't even begin to count the times I've thought pet owners were talking to their dogs while taking them for a walk when, in reality, they were blabbing on their cell phones. It's a different level of use than we've seen in the past, ... It's becoming more of a full-day listening experience as opposed to just when you're jogging. — Robert Novak

I don't like being in public with headphones on. I don't know how people can do it. It seems like you're so cut off from your environment. I feel like I'd get hit by a car. — Jeff Tweedy

I've come to the conclusion that people who wear headphones while they walk, are much happier, more confident, and more beautiful individuals than someone making the solitary drudge to work without acknowledging their own interests and power. — Jason Mraz

I write in the mornings once the kids have gone to school, taking my laptop and a coffee to a little writer's room in town where I plant noise-cancelling headphones on my head and get to work. — Jane Green

I was first influenced by a friend in fifth grade when he brought a Walkman to school and was listening to 'Paradise City' by Guns 'N Roses, which he had concealed within his hoodie. He put the headphones over my ears and I was completely blown away by what I heard. I'll never forget that. — Darren Robinson

Miniaturization of electronics started by NASA's push became an entire consumer products industry. Now we're carrying the complete works of Beethoven on a lapel pin listening to it in headphones. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

When I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I would pretend to be on the radio. I bought a mixer and these big, ugly headphones and I would literally broadcast the cassette tapes in my bedroom. — Ryan Seacrest

Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watchingand waiting for us. — Robert Moss

I first heard music while in the womb. My mom tells me she played Tubular Bells with the headphones against her stomach all the time. A bit disturbing as I believe that is the theme to The Exorcist. Maybe she thought she was having Satan's baby. — Venetian Snares

I had a job transcribing a biotechnology-litigation seminar. You put headphones on and fast-forward and stop with your feet. There were a lot of 'um's.' — Adam Schlesinger

You ever notice how long it takes for things to happen when you know they're supposed to happen? My fake Walkman has a built-in alarm, and I set it for two in the morning and wear the headphones to bed, but before you can wake up you have to fall asleep, and I never DO fall asleep because I keep waiting for the alarm to go off. — Rodman Philbrick

The hearing test, which involved sitting in a quiet room listening to noises of various pitch played through headphones, confirmed the worst. I had no hearing in my left ear whatsoever. — David Hewson

In Russia, as I sat there day after day wearing headphones, listening to the interpreter struggle to make our words relevant, I wondered if we could establish meaningful rapport with a nation that had never seen raisins dance in dark glasses on TV ... never had a garage sale. — Erma Bombeck

A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.
"Grammy's here!" he shouts.
He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where luckily she lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing on a rosebush. — George Saunders

I would often sit in the corner of the room wearing Dad's massive headphones, carefully replaying the records time after time. It was something I did frequently throughout my childhood with music, comedy and film, inspiring my own creative imagination, the headphones rendering the experience intensely personal, as though it were all happening inside my own head. — Simon Pegg

I used to play my records aloud until one night my mother was like, "This is too loud. I'm not having it," and so I put on headphones. But the headphones didn't stretch all the way to my bed from the record player, so I had to sleep on the floor in order to hear the records. I slept on the floor right next to the record player until I was probably 19 years old. — Lauryn Hill

Without Mona, Hanna felt like a great outfit without matching accessories, a screw-driver that was all orange juice and no vodka, and an iPod without headphones. She just felt wrong. — Sara Shepard

They solved the problem of coexistence through the use of individual stereo headphones. — William Blake

I can't hear anything, John. Please, would you put on your headphones? — Connie Sellecca

We are the outcasts, we are the ones that are different, we are the ones that never got along with anyone else, we are the ones that went back to our rooms and put on our headphones and listened to those records that made us happy — Bert McCracken

I sit with my back against a wall, put on my headphones, listen to the music, and imagine galaxies and stars and the Universe above, and I imagine all the light from space flowing into my head and down into my body, going wherever it needs to go. — Kamal Ravikant

I don't talk to media or anyone before games. I just put my headphones on, turn up some hip-hop, and get in the zone. — Kris Humphries

In the summer quiet. Just be. Joshua liked the Beatles, used to listen to them in his room, you could hear the noise even through the big headphones he loved. Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls. — Colum McCann

I have a particular pair of headphones I love so much I bring them everywhere: Beats Studio. It's perfect for watching movies as well because you feel like you have your own theater with you, even with your iPad. — Joe Taslim

His door opened, and Michael filled the doorway.
Gabriel yanked the headphones out of his ears, but music still poured out against his comforter. "Ever hear of knocking?"
He wanted his voice to be sharp, but he couldn't generate the usual anger.
He's not worthless. And you're out of line.
"I did knock," said Michael. "Three times. — Brigid Kemmerer

She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears. — Ali Smith

I remember lying on the floor of the living room with headphones on when I was four or five years old, listening to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. — Kevin Richardson

My mom is Christian, and she wouldn't let us listen to rock music. So me and my brother, we had this tape player with head phones, and we locked ouselves in the pantry. We were fighting over the headphones, sitting in the dark pantry listening to Metallica. — Joel Madden

Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's. — Tod Machover

Part of the problem is that people at our school don't listen. They just put on the headphones and tune out the world. It's intimidating. — Alexandra Robbins

He's the reason why I write music. If he's reading this - James Taylor, I'd love to work with you! My mom would put headphones on her belly before I was born, so I've been listening to him literally all of my life. When my dad played me 'Walking Man,' I heard those chord changes and that melody, it completely blew me away. — Charlie Puth

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with 'opportunities' by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. — Mark Cantrell

I always have my Bose headphones. I have to have the noise-cancelling headphones. — Brad Goreski

And a naked woman was waiting for him on it. Oh, crap. He'd forgotten all about Ellen, but Marcus's winery manager obviously hadn't forgotten about him. If things had gone differently tonight - way differently - he knew he would have been psyched to find her already stripped down and ready for him. Only, after meeting Chloe, Chase was about as unpsyched by Ellen's naked presence in the house as he could be. Ellen's eyes were wide as she looked between him and Chloe. Clearly, surprise had her frozen in place on the bed as it took her a minute to remove her iPod headphones. Obviously, the music had masked the sound of Chase and Chloe's conversation in the living room, and Ellen had had no idea that Chase wouldn't be walking through the bedroom door alone. — Bella Andre

The night I started playing your CD out loud for you, instead of playing it through my headphones?"
Now this made my eyebrows rise. "You listened to it before that night?"
"Every night. I've listened to it every single night since you gave it to me. — Kimberly Lauren

When I tell children that they are far too dependent on their gizmos, they do not deny it. But they really don't care. This is their real life - texting about trivial things; listening to numbing music on their private headphones. The machines block everything out - you create your own little trivial world. — Bill O'Reilly

Not many songs can fend off evil. But the right song with the right voice can be a weapon; anyone who's listened to music through headphones while riding the subway or plowing angrily through a rush-hour sidewalk knows how it can and separate you from them, allows you to say to the teeming masses that you are this and they are that. — Dave Eggers

I used to listen to my dad a lot as a way of trying to be close to him, as well, because my parents were divorced and I didn't spend that much time with him. And I used to put headphones on and listen to my dad talk and sing and I found that quite ... bonding with him, in a weird way. — Teddy Thompson

The time I like listening to music most on headphones is, I have a game I play with my brother, he's a musician as well.And he sends me MIDI files of keyboard pieces. So, these are pieces where I just get a MIDI file; I don't know what instrument he was playing them on; I know nothing about his section of the sound of the piece, and then when I'm sitting on trains I do a lot of train travel I turn them into pieces of music. And I love to do that; it's my favorite hobby. — Brian Eno

The desire to share is not a vague, windy sentiment, not when you see the massive rise in live concerts in response to the phenomenon of downloading music ... People want to get rid of the headphones and be part of a shared experience. — Richard Eyre

I like to get in my own world. When I'm getting ready for a meet, I always have headphones on, listening to rap music to get myself fired up — Michael Phelps

Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones. — Serge Schmemann

When you're sick of the world, lock your door, grab your pillow, plug in your headphones and turn the music up. — Dreamer Girl

Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with my
fanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, but
whatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none
of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and Algernon
Swinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it. — Rob Sheffield

You float like a feather," sings Radiohead, "In a beautiful world." I've listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I'm not sure I hear it myself, but I am pleased and touched. Sometimes that's what you need, just a quick casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in Garden State soundtrack. Now, that's a soundtrack. They were all songs that Zach Braff liked, so he put them in his movie. And there's that beautiful moment near the beginning where Natalie Portman hands him the headphones and she watches him listen to the song and she smiles her huge, innocent Natalie Portman smile. — Nicholson Baker

I try so hard, and it is still not working. I wear the same clothes as the others. I say the same words at the same times: good morning, hi, how are you, I'm fine, good night, please, thank you, you're welcome, no thank you, not right now. I obey the traffic laws; I obey the rules. I have ordinary furniture in my apartment, and I play my unusual music very softly or use headphones. But it is not enough. Even as hard as I try, the real people still want me to change, to be like them. — Elizabeth Moon

Besides my son, music is the most important thing to me. I always have music on in my car and playing at house, and I'm in the studio or performing every night. I like Beats by Dre for headphones, and Bang & Olufsen soundsystems. — French Montana

When you listen to a Yes album, you should listen to the whole thing through headphones with the lights off. — Trevor Rabin

There's something wrong with that boy." Clay sounded mystified. "He's talented, ain't no one gonna argue that, but yeah ... something."
Sweaty, tired, and sore, Romeo sat on the mat in the massive martial arts center Clay owned with Jules and Wyatt. While trying to catch his breath, he watched Tino move to the beat of his own drummer as he worked out using a punching bag. With white headphones in his ears, his brother bounced and danced and kicked at that stuffed sack of beans, and for the life of him, Romeo couldn't tell if he was trying to hurt the thing or date it. — Kele Moon

The audience is invisible and that's good. Somewhere my voice is drifting through a swine barn and the sound of it seems to perk up the sows' appetite. Or a lady is listening on headphones as she jogs along a beach, running to my cadence. Or a dog sits in front of the radio, head cocked, and the sibilants excite him in some mysterious way. A dog's humorist, that's me. — Garrison Keillor

I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, 'You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.'
'Okay,' I said.
'Really,' my dad said. 'I wouldn't bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you're worth, we'd just toss you out on the streets.'
'We're not sentimental people,' Mom added, deadpan. 'We'd leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas. — John Green