110+ Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes (Empowering, Poignant And Inspiring)

Laurie Halse Anderson is an American writer. She is known for her young adult novels, including Speak, Catalyst, Wintergirls, and The Impossible Knife of Memory. Her work often addresses issues of rape, eating disorders, and bullying, and she has received numerous awards for her writing.

Top 10 Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

1. I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don’t want to die.
2. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls
3. We turned us into wintergirls, and when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone.
4. There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.
5. I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles.
6. So, she tells me, the words dribbling out with the cranberry muffin crumbs, commas dunked in her coffee.
7. Write about the emotions you fear the most.
8. Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn't sick; I was strong.
9. I wish I had cancer. I will burn in hell for that, but it's true.
10. I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I'm stable.

Laurie Halse Anderson Image Quotes

I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Laurie Halse Anderson Short Quotes

• I inscribe three lines, hush hush hush, into my skin. Ghosts trickle out.
• I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.
• You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.
• When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time.
• A scar is a sign of strength. . .the sign of a survivor.
• Because I am still a little girl who believes in Santa and the tooth fairy and you.
• Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.
• Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.
• Sometimes being an adult means doing the right thing, even if it's not what you want.
• School libraries are the foundations of our culture – not luxuries.

Laurie Halse Anderson Famous Quotes And Sayings

We held hands when we walked down the gingerbread path into the forest, blood dripping from our fingers. We danced with witches and kissed monsters. We turned us into wintergirls, when she tried to leave, I pulled her back into the snow because I was afraid to be alone. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am beginning to measure myself in strength, not pounds. Sometimes in smiles. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Dead girl walking” the boys say in the halls. “Tell us your secrets” the girls whisper, one toilet to another. "I am that girl. I am the spaces between my thighs, daylight shinning through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I believe that you've created a metaphorical universe in which you can express your darkest fears. In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality. — Laurie Halse Anderson

For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe! — Laurie Halse Anderson

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too? — Laurie Halse Anderson

I don't just use yarn from a store. I buy old sweaters from consignment shops. The older the better, and unravel them. There are countries of women in this scarf/shawl/blanket. Soon it will be big enough to keep me warm. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The stars whirled above us and the firecrackers blazed. The moon stood watch as drops of blood fell, careless seeds that sizzled in the snow. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Can the plural possessive express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe! — Laurie Halse Anderson

I stand in the center aisle of the auditorium, a wounded zebra in a National Geographic special, looking for someone, anyone to sit next to. A predator approaches: gray jock buzz cut, whistle around a neck thicker than his head. Probably a social studies teacher, hired to coach a blood sport. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am almost a real girl the entire drive home. I went to a diner. I drank hot chocolate and ate french fries. Talked to a guy for a while. Laughed a couple of times. A little like ice-skating for the first time, wobbly, but I did it. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Do they choose to be so dense? Were they born that way? I have no friends. I have nothing. I say nothing. I am nothing. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I shake my head. I pick up the rake and start making the dead-leaf pile neater. A blister pops and stains the rake handle like a tear. Dad nods and walks to the Jeep, keys jangling in his fingers. A mockingbird lands on a low oak branch and scolds me. I rake the leaves out of my throat. Me: "Can you buy some seeds? Flower seeds? — Laurie Halse Anderson

Used to be that my whole body was my canvas-hot cuts licking my ribs, ladder rungs climbing my arms, thick milkweed stalks shooting up my thighs. — Laurie Halse Anderson

A little kid asks my dad why that man is chopping down the tree. Dad: He's not chopping it down. He's saving it. Those branches were long dead from disease. All plants are like that. By cutting off the damage you make it possible for the tree to grow again. You watch - by the end of summer, this tree will be the strongest on the block. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Nicole can do anything that involves a ball and whistle. — Laurie Halse Anderson

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I wish adults would spend less energy freaking out about the cutting itself and work harder to understand what drives kids to self-harm. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Gym should be illegal. It's humiliating. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Melancholy held me hostage, and the bees built a hive of sadness in my soul. — Laurie Halse Anderson

It's easier to floss with barbed wire than admit you like someone in middle school. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Too much sun after a Syracuse winter does strange things to your head, makes you feel strong, even if you aren't. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The bathroom door swings open. Emma sees the blood painting my skin and the red rivers carved on my body. Emma sees the wet knife, silver and bone. The screams of my little sister shatter mirrors. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Grandma frowned and yelled something in Russian. She could have been saying, 'Open up, your best friend is here.' On the other hand, it could have been, 'America is a great country because of canned ravioli. — Laurie Halse Anderson

i decapitated dandelions all morning, leaving carnage and death strewn into my path. — Laurie Halse Anderson

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close. — Laurie Halse Anderson

When life sucks, read. They can't yell at you for that. And if they do, then you can ignore them. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better. — Laurie Halse Anderson

It is easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say. — Laurie Halse Anderson

There is something about Christmas that requires a rug rat. Little kids make Christmas fun. I wonder if could rent one for the holidays. — Laurie Halse Anderson

She cannot chain my soul. Yes, she could hurt me. She'd already done so...I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live, or not. But she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her. — Laurie Halse Anderson

When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears? — Laurie Halse Anderson

I need a new friend. I need a friend, period. Not a true friend, nothing close or share clothes or sleepover giggle giggle yak yak. Just a pseudo-friend, disposable friend. Friend as accessory. Just so I don't feel or look so stupid. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Emma hears me come up the stairs and asks me to watch a movie with her. I stick Band-Aids on my weeping cuts, put on pink pajamas so we match, and snuggle with her under her rainbow comforter. She arranges all of her stuffed animals around us in a circle, everyone facing the TV, then presses play...Ghosts dare not enter here. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am so sorry. I wish you knew even one tenth of one percent of how sorry I am. ...It was my fault. Can I kill myself here, or should I do it outside, so the mess on your carpet doesn't upset your mother? — Laurie Halse Anderson

Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in? — Laurie Halse Anderson

I knit the afternoon away. I knit reasons for Elijah to come back. I knit apologies for Emma. I knit angry knots and slipped stitches for every mistake I ever made, and I knit wet, swollen stitches that look awful. I knit the sun down. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Mr. Freeman: You are getting better at this, but it's not good enough. This looks like a tree,but it is an average, ordinary, everyday, boring tree. Breathe life into it. Make it bend - trees are flexible, so they don't snap. Scar it, give it a twisted branch - perfect trees don't exist. Nothing is perfect. Flaws are interesting. Be the tree. — Laurie Halse Anderson

If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I reach for funny books all the time to help me get through life. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I’m the girl who trips on the dance floor and can’t find her way to the exit. All eyes on me. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Mr. Freeman sighs. "No imagination. What are you thirteen? Fourteen? You've already let them beat your creativity out of you! — Laurie Halse Anderson

Cold and silence. Nothing quieter than snow. The sky screams to deliver it, a hundred banshees flying on the edge of the blizzard. But once the snow covers the ground, it hushes as still as my heart. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Be careful what you wish for. There's always a catch. — Laurie Halse Anderson

My English teacher has no face. She has uncombed stringy hair that droops on her shoulders. The hair is black from her part to her ears and then neon orange to the frizzy ends. I can't decide if she had pissed off her hairdresser or is morphing into a monarch butterfly. I call her Hairwoman. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am learning how to be angry and sad and lonely and joyful and excited and afraid and happy. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The constitution does not recognize different classes of citizenship based on time spent living in the country. I am a citizen, with the same rights as your son, or you. As a citizen, and as a student, I am protesting the tone of this lesson as racist, intolerant, and xenophobic. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I was good at digging holes. It was the rest of life I sucked at. — Laurie Halse Anderson

She turns to us, acts surprised to see us, then does the bit with the back of the hand to the forehead. "You're lost!" "You're angry!" "You're in the wrong school!" "You're in the wrong country!" "You're on the wrong planet! — Laurie Halse Anderson

If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet. — Laurie Halse Anderson

We've fallen down on our responsibility to our children by somehow creating this world where they're surrounded by images of sexuality; and yet, we as adults struggle to talk to kids honestly about sex, the rules of dignity and consent. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The light beyond my eyes flashflashflashes with a hundred futures for me. Doctor. Ship's captain. Forest ranger. Librarian. Beloved of that man or that women or those children or those people who voted for me or who painted my picture. Poet. Acrobat. Engineer. Friend. Guardian. Avenging whirlwind. A million futures--not all pretty, not all long, but all of them mine. I do have a choice" - p. 271 — Laurie Halse Anderson

I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page — Laurie Halse Anderson

They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am super proud of being an American, but we fail our veterans every day. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I keep thinking that if I could just unzip my skin, step out of this body, then I would see who I really am.“ She nods her head slowly. „What do you think you‘d look like?” “Smaller, for a start. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Gossip is the foul smell from the Devil's backside. — Laurie Halse Anderson

They say they have noticed me drawing. I almost tell them right then and there. They noticed. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am not going to think about it. It was ugly, but it’s over, and I’m not going to think about it. — Laurie Halse Anderson

You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beat- ing heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I sit at a table close to his desk. Ivy is in this class. She sits by the door. I keep staring at her, trying to make her look at me. That happens in movies - people can feel it when oother people stare at them and they just have to turn around and say something. Either Ivy has a great force field, or my lazer vision isn't very strong. — Laurie Halse Anderson

We're good at taking care of little kids, and spend a lot of energy teaching them things like how to read. But when kids get as tall as their parents and can look them in the eyes, we tend to drop the ball - at a time they most need a loving consistent community of adults, be it parents, aunts, uncles, or others. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I doubt trees are ever told to 'be the screwed-up ninth-grader.' — Laurie Halse Anderson

I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Did you read last nights assignments?" Say "yes'" and get hammered again. Say "no'" and the same thing would happen. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up. — Laurie Halse Anderson

There is nothing wrong with me. These are really sick people, sick that you can see. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I wonder how long it would take for anyone to notice if I just stopped talking. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For awhile. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's to late because you are maintaining it now,straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I pushed my ragged mouth against the mirror. A thousand crushed bleeding lips pushed back at me. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I knew it!" He pumps a fist into the air. "You've fallen in love with me. You want to have my babies. We'll get a team of horses and a covered wagon and we'll journey to South America and raise goats. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Can't escape pain, kiddo. Battle through it and you get stronger. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Oppressive bastards, think they own the place. I told them that karma's going to kick their asses. — Laurie Halse Anderson

CONJUGATE THIS: I cut class, you cut class, he, she, it cuts class. We cut class, they cut class. We all cut class. I cannot say this in Spanish because I did not go to Spanish today. Gracias a dios. Hasta luego. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I am getting better at smiling when people expect it. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I've written in every imaginable location; a repurposed closet, the kitchen table, the bleachers while my kids had basketball practice, the front seat of the car when they were at soccer. In airports. On trains. In the break room when I was supposed to be wolfing down dinner. In the back of classrooms when I was supposed to be paying attention. — Laurie Halse Anderson

You were born with the seeds of your talent, the ability to observe the world around you and weave piece of it into a story. I believe that most -- if not all -- people are born with these seeds. What separates the writers from the non-writers is that the writers actually sit down and, you know... write. — Laurie Halse Anderson

This camp is a forge for the army; it's testing our mettle. Instead of heat and hammer, our trials are cold and hunger. Question is, what are we made of? — Laurie Halse Anderson

And then a new screen, one I had never seen before, never even heard of popped up. It gave me a choice. I could become the new Lord of Darkness myself, or I could take a gamble and be reincarnated. I chose wisely. — Laurie Halse Anderson

To keep up appearances, I stomp my room and slam the door. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I pull my lower lip all the way in between my teeth. If I try hard enough, maybe I can gobble my whole self this way.... I didn't try hard enough to swallow myself. — Laurie Halse Anderson

Life Lessons by Laurie Halse Anderson

1. Laurie Halse Anderson teaches us to never give up on our dreams and to keep pushing forward, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
2. She also encourages us to be true to ourselves and to never let anyone else define who we are or what we can achieve.
3. Lastly, she reminds us to always be kind and to use our words to lift up those around us and to make the world a better place.