“Sometimes grown ups don’t act their right old age”

A little glitter can turn your whole day around.

A stick or a stone only stings for a minute. A name seems to hurt forever.

The upside to grief is it takes away your appetite. When people say you look good they really mean it. Nature’s thoughtful that way.

I don’t really believe in pretending to be happy when you’re not. Mostly I believe that you should burden your friends with your problems.

I’m not actually sure I’m grown-up enough for grown-up books.

Even though sometimes you can control your anger, you can’t control your sadness.

I don’t even like clowns. Clowns are not normal people.

Can’t we be friends?’ I hate your guts, Frankovitch’ Can’t our guts be friends?

Society just has a way of inhibiting you, which is good and bad.

I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. It’s perfectly okay to take a book, read it, have a good time, giggle and laugh – and turn off the TV. I love that.

When you’re in between dreams, you get to lean back and relax and stop trying so hard. Trying to be somebody, I mean. It’s not as exciting as being a television star, but it’s not that bad, either. You just have to learn to be satisfied with the way you are for a while. Not Forever. Just until you’re finished resting.

Our nannas are losers.

I’m so lazy as far as liking to get up, go to the office in my pajamas, get dressed about noon. And I hate flying. So I have this really laid-back, good lifestyle, and it’s hard to nudge me out of it.

I was a good kid, but I was just very chatty. Teachers were rarely entertained, but occasionally a child was, which was enough for me. Everything was so urgent. I needed to say it immediately.

Junie B. Jones. The B stands for Beatrice. Except, I don’t like Beatrice. I just like B and that’s all.

I find the term perfect child to be an oxymoron.

Sometimes all I want is to be a few inches taller so the world does not look like a dense collection of torsos.

Love is fine for singing about and love songs are good to listen to, sometimes even to dance to. But when we need food for our stomachs and clothes for our backs, love is nothing. Ah my lady, the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves.

I find men’s clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity.

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.

Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.

We’re on the computers, phones and tablets all day long, sometimes you just need to escape from the screens.

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle.