Best 20 quotes of Jack Gantos on MyQuotes

Because each book has its own special perfume.

Don't ever forget your history," she sang, "or any wicked soul can lie to you and get away with it.

Each time I read a book, I cataloged the parts that struck me dumb with envy and admiration for their beauty and power and truth.

If you have an orderly mind, you'll be a winner no matter where you end up. If your mind is a jumble of junk, you'll be a loser. It's as simple as that.

It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.

I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey.

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn’t want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, “good book,” as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.

When Patti Fox broke up with me, I typed her name over a thousand times on my manual Olivetti until the entire page was beaten into a stiff sheet of black ink.

...who proved that you don't have to do what your parents want, or what your boyfriend wants, for you to be happy. You just have to be yourself, for there is no love greater than self love

You can't do anything for a person who is stuck between being happy and being miserable. All you can do is get trapped in the middle, and anyone in the middle just gets squished.' -Grandma

You gotta face the hand you're dealt with and deal with it, and make your problems be the smallest part of who you are.

You know, Joey, the medication has helped settle you down, but you have been a good kid all along. You are naturally good. I hope you know that about yourself. You have a good heart.

Another thing I've been trying to do on my walks is to know what I'm looking at, when I'm looking at it. I want to be smart. When I walk down the sidewalk I see about a hundred different kinds of bugs and all I do is point at them like a caveman and say 'Ugh, look, a bug,' but I know each one of them must have a different name and a different reason why and how it came to be on the planet, and I don't know any of that stuff.

But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians who collected the tiniest books of human history. Mrs. Hamsby, who died yesterday at age seventy-seven, was the first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost letters, those scraps of history that ended up as undeliverable in a quiet corner of Norvelt. But they were not unwanted. Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each envelope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient fish. You were always welcome to unpin any envelope and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing in a library full of abandoned histories. Each room has its own mosif of stamps, so that the parlor room is papered with huamn stamps as if people such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had come to visit. The bedroom has the stamps of lovely landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain. Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of history captured like an ant in amber. there is history in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed into the unknown. And for this tiny museum of lost hisotry we citizens of Norvelt thank her.

Eventually, her designed genetic material will be implanted into my egg, which first would have had my genetic material removed. Then my mother could become my baby. And someday, when I get old, I can become her baby. Then she will be mine, and I will be hers.

For one second I thought I saw it and I reached down and snatched up a little flesh-colored round thing, but ti was just a used round Band-Aid. My mother slapped it out o fmy hand and that was the first moment I realized she was mad at me too. And suddenly it was as if my heart was as uncontrollable as my legs. All this time I thought she was on my side, because I wa son her side. But maybe she had given up on me too. So I didn't say anything more because I was scared she was going to be against me like everyone else.

Granny was right,' I said. 'When you forgive someone it does make you stronger. It makes your heart bigger than your hate.

Not romantic," she disagreed. "To me it would be romantic if Antony properly fell on his sword and kicked the bucket and Cleopatra escaped and lived a lovely life sailing along the Nile without him and his big ideas ruining her kingdom.

Still, he was another guy in the house, and Mom was mine first, and her being my mom is a thousand times more important than her being some guy's girlfriend. So even though Booth wasn't trying to run the show, he was still in the way.

Your pony, he said as he stomped toward me. "I'm the farrier who is here to fix your pony." "I thought you were a Hells Angel," I said. "I used to be," he replied. "But fighting all the time and being really drunk and nasty got boring. So now I just take care of animals.