Killing Mr. Griffin Quotes
"Someday I’m going to live in a cabin on the shore of a lake where everything is peaceful and green and the only sound is lapping water."
"Nobody is ever an old maid these days. The term is ‘single person.’"
"The ability to drop balls through baskets will serve you well in life. It may keep your wrists limber into old age."
"There are those who might consider suicide an event of some importance in a young woman’s life."
"Any student who allows them to interfere with his academic responsibilities must be prepared to accept the consequences."
"Early to bed and early to rise makes the days fly."
"Anything worth doing is worth striving to perfect. If you are able to do it well, why should you do it halfway?"
"Who would have thought the old man had so much strength in him!"
"What’s wrong with saying things the way other people have if it’s the best way to say them? You can’t just make words up out of the air."
"The best way to avoid criticism is not to earn it."
"It lasts longer," Mrs. Cline had told her. "Prettiness fades, but a girl can be cute right into middle age."
"The startling part was that he did not look much different than he did in the classroom."
"We are your students, present, past and future," Mark told him. "We are representatives of every poor kid who has ever walked into your dungeon of a classroom. We come to bring you ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ We’re here to deliver revenge."
"The truth was that she would not have left the class for anything in the world."
"I’d rather be cute than beautiful," she had said once to her mother, who had smiled and agreed.
"He’s a live one, you’ve got to say that for him."
"We didn’t. He’s just fine. If I pull off this bag, the first thing he’d do would be spit in my face."
"He cared about me—he wanted to save me! We can’t just leave him up there alone in the dark. It’s too dreadful! We’ve got to go get him!"
"He’s dead," David said. He had not meant to state it so abruptly.
"How could one describe those eyes staring upward into the far-reaching, incredible space of the night sky?"
"It’s a dream, that’s all, one of those crazy dreams that seem so real and yet you know all the time down underneath that in a minute you’ll wake up."
"She was still not crying. Even before entering the car he could tell that by the lift of her chin."
"People don’t disappear ‘into thin air,’ as you put it. Your husband is somewhere, and we’ll do everything we can to locate him."
"The tears came at last with the suddenness of a dam bursting, one gigantic sob that seemed to shake the car, and then the wild, heavy weeping."
"Wouldn’t it have been worse if he had been behind the wheel of his car and plowed straight into a bunch of kids waiting for the schoolbus?"
"It’s all right, Sue—Susie—it’s all right, baby. Just trust me, okay? It’s all going to be all right."
"I wish we could go back to then and start all over."
"There’s no sense burying a wallet full of cash along with him."
"Don’t joke, Jeff. This is just sickening. I’m sitting here trying not to throw up."
"I don’t like to see him lowering himself that way. It’s degrading."
"Our Father—which art in heaven—hallowed be Thy name—"
"It has to be done," Mark had said, and it was true.
"We didn’t do it," David whispered. "It was an accident, something that would have happened anyway. We weren’t responsible."
"I love them so much, Susan thought. How could I ever have imagined that I didn’t?"
"I am not Susan anymore, she thought. I am not the person they know as their daughter and their sister. I am a stranger who has lived through things they cannot even imagine and who has changed into someone foreign to them all."
"You made up several things about that interview. You told the police that Brian was jumpy, that he kept glancing at his watch and hardly paid any attention to what he was talking about."
"Neither a borrower nor a lender be," he says. He says it all the time.
"Being old doesn’t mean you can’t see things clear. I see things fine."
"I just know that when I saw that ring on his hand, there was something about it that made me feel—as though it was—mine."
"I don’t understand it any better than you do. I took it, and that’s that."
"Mark has to know everything, or he won’t be able to tell us what to do."
"The winds of freedom are filled with laughter."
"People who do halfway jobs shouldn’t do them at all."
"Old people fall down, you know? It happens all the time."
"You’ve got to get the curtains started. That’s what makes a place really go up."
"It’s only by facing things that you ever put them behind you."
"This individual has a behavior pattern that brings him repeatedly into conflict with society. He is incapable of significant loyalty to individuals, groups, or social values. He is selfish, callous, irresponsible, impulsive, and totally unable to experience guilt."
"I love him, Susan thought, realizing it for the first time. And I hate him. And he is going to kill me."
"It is indeed the 'little deaths,' the small, daily rejections of our well-meant offerings, that render the soul lifeless."
"Where the daisies laugh and blow, Where the willow leaves hang down, Nonny, nonny, I will go There to weave my lord a crown."
"Water, water, cold and deep, Hold me fast that I may sleep. Death with you is hardly more Than the little deaths before."
"You don’t have to have something ‘wrong with you’ to need help in understanding things."
"We’re in this together, aren’t we? Whatever happens to you happens to all of us."