Meg Rosoff Quotes

When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.

I don't get nearly enough credit in life for the things I manage not to say.

Perhaps the way to succeed is to think of life on Earth as a colossal joke, a creation of such immense stupidity that the only way to live is to laugh until you think your heart will break.

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef. Timing is everything.

If you have the patience to wait and watch, history will reshape truth (weakest of all forces, and weightless) in the image of opinion. What really happened will cease to matter and, eventually, cease to exist.

Fate is trying to kill me. I miss my dog. What's a doctor going to say? You're not ill, you're mad as a muffin? They'll either lock me up or tell me to get a grip and no one will believe the truth anyway.

It was not a big smile, not particularly bold or polite or ironic or glib, not asking for anything or offering anything, not stringy or careless, not, in short, like any smile I had ever experienced before. But such a smile! You could burn a hole in the world with that smile.

The imagination can be dangerous. It can change the world. And that is why we write.

She frowned at him. 'You are in love with solitude.' 'Is there a better cure for the world than solitude?

I'd like to think life has improved since 1850, despite the long hours we all seem to spend slaving over hot computers, but the psychological journeys remain the same - the search for love, identity, a meaningful place in the world.

And after awhile of this my brain and my body and every single inch of me that was alive was flooded with the feeling that I was starving, starving for Edmond. And what a coincidence, that was the feeling I loved best in the world.

And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of helpless, selfless love, to behold itself, illuminated, in the golden light of another's eyes.

Somewhere along the line I'd lost the will not to eat.

I give thanks for all that has passed, for all that is passing, and for all that is yet to come.

It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.

After all this time, I know exactly where I belong.

I felt a momentary urge to leap into the sea and swim free of the present.

While working in advertising, I channelled my creative energy into elaborate escape fantasies: cake making, dog breeding, the Peace Corps.

I guess there was a war going on somewhere in the world that night but it wasn't one that could touch us.

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

Now let's try to understand that falling into sexual and emotional thrall with an underage blood relative hadn't exactly been on my list of Things to Do while visiting England,but I was coming around to the belief that whether you liked it or not, Things Happen and once they start happening you pretty much just have to hold on for dear life and see where they drop you when they stop.

Every war has turning points and every person too.

it was love, of course, though I didn't know it then and Finn was both its subject and object. He accepted love instinctively, without responsibility or conditions, like a wild thing glimpsed through trees.