82 Quotes by Gary D. Schmidt

Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.

You know one thing that Mr. Powell taught me? He taught me that sometimes, art can make you forget everything else all around you. That's what are can do.

more to be a human being with

You can't just skip the boring parts.""Of course I can skip the boring parts.""How do you know they're boring if you don't read them?""I can tell.""Then you can't say you've read the whole play.""I think I can live a happy life, Meryl Lee, even if I don't read the boring parts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.""Who knows?" she said. "Maybe you can't.

You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all that big a difference? What difference? And why should I have to guess what the difference is? Isn't that what he's supposed to say?Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.

Whatever it means to be a friend, taking a black eye for someone has to be in it.

And Meryl Lee thought, I wonder how this happens. You live side by side for a while, and suddenly you realize you like living side by side, and you can’t imagine not living side by side because you’ve become friends. And then your friends become friends with one another, and they sit beside one another and cry. How does that happen?But isn’t it good that it does?

It’s hard to figure out how a friendship begins, she thought. Maybe sometimes it’s because someone you thought you knew - and that you didn’t really - turns out to be a whole lot more like a friend than you ever guessed.