Gary D. Schmidt Quotes

Vengeance is sweet. Vengeance taken when the vengee isn't sure who the venger is, is sweeter still.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

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.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

I almost cried. But I didn't, because if you're in seventh grade and you cry while wearing a blue floral cape and yellow tights with white feathers on the butt, you just have to curl up and die somewhere in a dark alley.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

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?

~ Gary D. Schmidt

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

~ Gary D. Schmidt

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

~ Gary D. Schmidt

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

~ Gary D. Schmidt

Would you have left a guy being beat up to go find a teacher?' I asked.My father, he wiped his hand across his face, and what was left behind was a smile.Really, a smile.'Not in a million years,' he said.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

He missed him like he would miss the sun if it fell out of the sky.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

He felt it deep, like a stone too big to heft out of the garden. He just had to how around it and make do.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

We carry our childhood with us.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

Mr. Ferris didn't say anything the whole time. He sat next to me and listened. And when I finished, I looked at him.He was crying. I'm not lying. He was crying.I don't think it was because how hard I hit him.I know how the Black-Backed Gull feels when he looks up into the sky.Maybe, somehow, Mr. Ferris does too.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

I know. That sounds like a lie. But Presbyterians know that every so often a lie isn't all that bad, and I figured that this was about the best place it could happen.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

Okay, so maybe sometimes the real world is smiles and miracles.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

Reader, I kissed her. A quiet walk we had, she and I.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

A comedy isn’t about being funny...a comedy is about characters who dare to know that they may choose a happy ending after all.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

A southwest blow on ye and blister you all o'er!''The red plague rid you!''Toads, beetles, bats, light on you!''As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed with raven's feather from unwholesome fen drop on you.''Strange stuff''Thou jesting monkey thou''Apes with foreheads villainous low''Pied ninny''Blind mole...' -The Caliban Curses

~ Gary D. Schmidt

When 1:45 came, half the class left, and Danny Hupfer whispered, If she gives you a cream puff after we leave, I'm going to kill you - which was not something that someone headed off to prepare for his bar mitzvah should be thinking.When 1:55 came and the other half of the class left, Meryl Lee whispered, If she gives you one after we leave, I'm going to do Number 408 to you. I didn't remember what Number 408 was, but it was probably pretty close to what Danny Hupfer had promised.Even Mai Thi looked at me with narrowed eyes and said, I know your home. Which sounded pretty ominous.

~ Gary D. Schmidt

There are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't one of them... Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

~ Gary D. Schmidt