140 Quotes by Rebecca Stead

Einstein says common sense is just habit of thought. It’s how we’re used to thinking about things, but a lot of the time it just gets in the way.

Life is where you sleep and what you see when you wake up in the morning, and who you tell about your weird dream, and what you eat for breakfast and who you eat it with. Life isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you make yourself, all the time.

Sometimes you never feel meaner than the moment you stop being mean. It’s like how turning on a light makes you realize how dark the room had gotten. And the way you usually act, the things you would have normally done, are like these ghosts that everyone can see but pretends not to.

Let’s say everyone has nine thousand things about themselves,” Em had explained to Tab and Bridge in sixth grade, “and say two people fall in love because it seems like all their things match up. But what they don’t know is that only like a thousand of their things actually match up. My mom says most people who get married don’t even know those other eight thousand things about themselves yet. So it could happen to anyone.

Love is when your heart wraps around something and won’t let go.

People don’t want to think about it.’ ‘I can see why,’ I said. ‘It makes my head hurt.’ ‘Still, you did better than most people. You’re a pretty smart kid.’ I rolled my eyes. ‘Gee, thanks.

The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it’s a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.

Belle surprised me. ‘Well, it’s simple to love someone,’ she said. ‘But it’s hard to know when you need to say it out loud.

There are days when everything changes, and this was one of those days.