The Center Of Everything Quotes
"Six is just a number, bigger than five, smaller than seven."
"God put America between two oceans on purpose."
"If you do something wrong, or even think it, he’ll know."
"Cars are like people, and you have to get to know them before you can fix them."
"My parents didn’t do all the work, if that’s what you’re saying. My dad helped me with the wood, but it was my idea. I worked hard on that. I worked really hard."
"Randy is the nicest bus driver our route has ever had—he is much better than Stella from the year before."
"You don’t see them, you don’t hear them, but you know they’re there."
"I won because I followed directions," I say, but I can hear the shakiness in my own voice.
"I wait until the next day, when she isn’t so mad, to tell her I won the science fair."
"But I know that I am the only one who hates Traci Carmichael."
"I try to imagine my mother jumping on her bed, ignoring her own rules."
"I was so sad two days ago, but now my mother is in a good mood and there are groceries in the cabinets."
"I hear her footsteps moving back and forth on the carpet in the hallway, the toilet flushing."
"I am at my limit, okay? I don’t care how hot it is. Go put on your goddamn tights."
"But that’s how it is sometimes. Sometimes you have to be mean."
"I’m sorry, Evelyn. I just can’t…I just can’t carry you anymore…"
"I’m not confused. I know who the father is. I just don’t want to tell you. It’s not your business, okay?"
"But she starts crying again, her hands folded, head bowed."
"Only the faithful will be ushered through the wind and rain to live in perfect salvation."
"Nature has to get rid of imperfections in the womb, or soon after, to make certain that imperfection isn’t allowed to mate and reproduce itself."
"The universe is so big that there may not even be a middle."
"If something goes on forever, there can’t be a middle, a top, or a bottom."
"This is Lawrence, Kansas. Over. Is anyone there? Anyone at all?"
"God knows what names are written in the book of followers."
"But I hate school," Deena says, lying back on her bed. "I really, really hate it."
"They’ve built a McDonald’s across the highway in the field next to the Kwikshop, where I used to see the deer."
"They’ll just go somewhere else," Deena says. "They’ll be fine."
"This isn’t a library, girls," she says, her voice loud, embarrassing us on purpose.
"They are older than Eileen, some of them, but they sit in booths across from us, sipping coffee, watching her, not even caring if she can tell."
"No," she says quickly, not even thinking it over. "No thanks."
"People made fun of me. Morgan Fairchild said this to the man interviewing her on television."
"I love babies," Deena says, kissing Samuel on his pale, soft cheek.
"I don’t want to go drive around in Ed’s van. I want to go lie down on the highway and let a truck run over me."
"That’s cool," Mr. Goldman says. "And now here I am."
"We’re having sex, silly goose," she whispers, rolling her eyes back, shutting them.
"I have to think this same thing will happen to me, because it’s too terrible to think that it won’t, that I might have to go through my whole life being ugly."
"She’s so pretty," Deena says, looking at the picture.
"It would be easier, maybe, if you just didn’t think at all."
"But if she isn’t lying, then Eileen is. And then that means that maybe Genesis is a story that somebody made up."
"I could write something down, and that wouldn’t make it true."
"Just because Deena reads slowly doesn’t mean she can’t see the little part of me that is happy about what I am telling her now."
"You can’t forgive someone who isn’t even sorry in the first place."
"It’s just a small thing, him feeding himself, just a little something he has learned, something she has taught him."
"If you are good at imagining something, it can be almost like it is happening. In a way, there is no difference at all."
"But I suppose if my mother wants to think that he understands her words, fine. She isn’t hurting anyone, and I think that, maybe, she is the one who needs to hear them."
"I have watched my mother long enough to know that there are all kinds of ways of being smart."
"I’m not supposed to tell, but I feel bad for her. She shouldn’t be whiling away her days dreaming about the life she and Travis are going to have by an ocean somewhere when he is thinking about college and Australia."
"Even when people start to get up and move toward one another, clasping hands, I just sit there, still and dumb."
"I am trying to figure out whether or not I’m a bad person."
"It is difficult to imagine Traci Carmichael like this, her blue-gray eyes hurled into the pavement and ended, just like that."
"It's like swimming underwater, this whole year. I just close my eyes, hold my breath, and keep kicking."
"It’s just the way it is now. It’s just the way it is."
"I have not been to school. I am certain she is hiding from me, but I am watching for her, waiting for her to come outside."
"Sometimes you can feel it when someone is watching you, even if you are turned in the other direction."
"But now that something bad really has happened to them, I wish it all would have worked out for them."
"I think back to my own first grade, and I remember putting together jigsaw puzzles of the fifty states in the union, letter books, and long pages of single-digit addition."
"I keep thinking about The Day After, how it was filmed here. I think of the voice on the commercial saying, 'This is Lawrence, Kansas. Is anybody there? Anybody at all?'"
"It would be like magic to get to walk around back there, from the arctic to the tropics and back again, easily stepping from one world to another, taking it all in at once."
"The stars are still glimmering, still shiny as eyes. They are not eyes, though, just hot balls of gas, far, far away."
"Times like this especially, I hate to think that the Earth is just a rock spinning in space, and that if it ever stopped or even slowed down, that would be the end for everybody."
"But looking at him, even with the scratching claw inside me, I feel bad for him. Maybe he didn’t really choose this. Maybe he didn’t get to choose at all."
"Sitting here, looking at him, I can understand better than anyone how you can be pulled toward someone even when you don’t want to be, just because of the way his voice sounds, the way his skin is stretched across the bones of his face."
"But Mr. Torvik said there was no reason to think that this would happen anytime soon. If we don’t mess it up, he said, the Earth should just keep spinning, all the plants and animals and people turning right along with it, safely tucked beneath the clouds."