Best 54 quotes of Andrew Smith on MyQuotes

Again, for the record, let me restate: you can't be rude to a coffee grinder and only an idiot would thank it for pulverizing beans. But you could, and probably should, unplug it if it doesn't shut up.

And if we were stuck here forever - and maybe this was just a naturally morbid thought for a teenage boy- I wondered who among us would die first and who ultimately would be left alone.

And I've been counting and recounting all the finite experiences that it never seemed to matter at all: riding on a subway, getting sand in my shoes at the beach, being woken up by the sound of a neighbor's barking dog. Because do you ever look at your life and say, hey, how many more times will I ever pack a suitcase for a trip, or write my name with a mechanical pencil, or use a tape measure? Every experience we have, everything is finite. That’s what it is to be human - because everything we do, or don't do but think about doing, is strained through our awareness of limits. Maybe there was some comfort, some beauty, in being a cog where the infinite was feasible.

And maybe that's the whole point, after all - that everyone of us who existed spent all those limitless days over the thousands of centuries we were here just trying to figure out what it meant to be us. The mousetrap trigger is this precise point: Pour the word us into the coding of a human, and we immediately discount as inferior or useless all the not-us things in the universe. Are you one of us?

And never farting pointed to guilt in the courthouse of my mind.

And you can't see around corners. so you just have to deal with it, and try to stay afloat. And things get tough. And you're supposed to grow up. And it's all a bunch of bullshit. Sorry.

Apollo has something to teach us as we enter a new century of genetic modification, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology. It's a cautionary tale about that most fundamentally human of human tragedies .. wanting something so badly that you end up destroying it.

A world between my fingers.

But Jack doesn't cry. Maybe.

Clocks are as pointless on the Tennessee as poets are on Earth.

Coffee is a girl who never tells a boy no.

Had (President) Kennedy turned to his advisers and wailed, "What can we beat the Russians at?" and if someone had cried "Backgammon!" at that point, Apollo would never have happened.

Here are five bullets for the boys on the boat. Here is one more for the saint.

History chews up sexually uncertain boys, and spits us out as recycled, generic greeting cards for lonely old men.

History is full of decapitations, and Iowa is no exception.

History shows that an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man’s library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul.

I am going to build something big for you.

I began to consider the fact that maybe history is actually the great destroyer of free will.

I came unglued and went back together the wrong way and fell apart again.

If it's impossible to understand how I could kick a weeping, torn-in-half cog that was gushing something that looked like tapioca pudding and whale semen on my nice shiny space suit, then you probably never kicked a car for getting a flat tire, or slapped a television remote when the batteries were getting weak, in which case you'll never understand what it means or meant to be a human.

I hold together pretty well, considering how much my atoms have been through.

I saw you dead.

I know it's kind of ridiculous, but I realize now how wrong that old pervert Mr. Wellins is. Almost nothing at all is ever about sex, unless you never grow up, that is. It's about love, and maybe not having it. What an old, delusional idiot he is. But what do I know? I'm just fourteen.

I love how, whenever you tell me a story, you go backwards and forwards and tell me everything else that could possibly be happening in every direction, like an explosion. Like a flower blooming.

I once heard a tobacco-chewing hog farmer say that, in Iowa, folks like to spread out their children like dog shit on a dance floor.

I stomped to the door, which was dumb because nobody can hear teenagers stomping in space. What's the point stopping if no one can hear you?

It almost boosts your self-esteem being screamed at by someone with an English accent.

It's no wonder I became a monster, too.

It's still home, Cager, and there's something about home, no matter how untidy we've left it.

It was so pleasant, chaotic, emotionless, nameless-everything vibrating so beautifully in the universe without words.

I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we.

Man will tell woman he will die for her, but I say, tell woman that you will die for her both physically and interior

Mind the gap, Jack

Nonsense. You aren’t alive to begin with,” I pointed out. “Suck it up and make the best of it, Milo. The future is bright, I assure you.” “We come into existence, and we float through space, doomed, until we all die horribly. No reason to live at all.” Milo the busboy wept uncontrollably. He probably knew more than I did, but who can say?

Not a very pretty world, is it?" "Which one?

Readers of history may decide that joking while two guys are driving around through a town that has recently been slaughtered by six-foot-tall praying mantis beasts with shark-tooth-studded arms is in poor taste. It is. But that is exactly what real boys have always done when confronted with the brutal aftermath of warfare.

Roll. Tap. Tap. Tap

Santa Claus is a lie but if you think that's bad, check out what 'fuck' really means.

That day, getting through my world was like trying to swim in a pool of warm mayonnaise while carrying two bowling balls.

That's really what all books are, isn't it? I mean, lists of secrets and things you only wish you’d done - a sort of deathbed confession where you're trying to get it all out while the lights are still on.

There is something inside all boys that drives us to go away again and again and again.

The same words that make the horrible things come also tell the quieter things about love.

Was Apollo worth all the effort and expense? If it had been about the Moon, the answer would be no, but it wasn't, it was about the Earth. The answer is yes. The only thing I can't see in all this is a rationale for going back. Unless we could find a way to take everyone.

We made this stupid rule and this stupid rule. Boys are not allowed to love each other. Then we painted a bison on the wall.

We only think of days and months to keep track of times that aren't now. Fuck days. Fuck months. This was how it was going to be from now on: forever.

What kind of world did our fathers abandon us to?

When I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind's eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Alan Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple yet miraculous fact they they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he.

Worry and regret are both useless weights that provide no drag. They never did anything to slow down the planet for one goddamned second.

You could never get everything in a book. Good books are always about everything.

You fill my sombrero with sexual pudding!