Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

When someone has a very urgent response, I think it just means that it's triggering something in them that they may not necessarily want to think or talk about - which I see as a positive thing.

Well, I think in my first two novels, both the characters are pretty neurotic, which I would say that I am.

Well, I grew up in the Bay Area, so I've been in earthquakes before.

Sometimes you have to confront your demons and sometimes even let them loose to genuinely find a place where you can gain some understanding.

Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up in the crucible of their days and certainly not always - if ever - capable of articulating their condition.

Sometimes it's hard to tell where your instincts start and your baggage stops.

Rage is exciting, but leaves me confused and exhausted.

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

I'm not a monster; I'm a white rabbit.

Whatever the natural cause, sin is the true cause of all earthquakes.

Literature is achieved anxiety.

He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!" he annouced.

Most of my problems come from rejecting parts of myself.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.

Guilt stirs me, but only to self-pity.

You don't believe it because you don't understand," he said hoarsely. "Prosper was different. He wasn't like other people. He might have hated me, but he loved me too. In his own way. He couldn't help it; not after raising me for all those years." When no one responded – when he saw nothing but expressions of disbelief on the faces around him – Cadel wailed, "He did! He did! I know he did! He only wanted to wreck my life because he wasn't a part of it!" And as sympathetic hands reached out towards him from every corner of the car, Cadel began to cry like someone whose heart was breaking.

I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face.

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

Only fools, liars, and charlatans predict earthquakes

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.

Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.