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

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.

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.

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?

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

more to be a human being with

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

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

You know one thing that Mr. Powell taught me? He taught me that sometimes, art can make you forget everything else all around you. That's what are can do.

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.

Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?""Sometimes I do," she said, and then smiled. "but sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.

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

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.

We carry our childhood with us.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Within a year, possibly by next fall," he was saying, "something that has never before been done, will be done. NASA will be sending men to the moon. Think of that. Men who were once in classrooms like this one will leave their footprints on the lunar surface." He paused. I leaned in close against the wall so I could hear him. "That is why you are sitting here tonight, and why you will be coming here in the months ahead. You come to dream dreams. You come to build fantastic castles up in the air. And you come to learn how to build the foundations that make those castles real. When the men who will command that mission were boys your age, no one knew. But in a few months, that's what will happen. So, twenty years from now, what will people say of you? 'No one knew then that this kid Washington Irving High School would grow up to do'...what? What castle will you build?

Mrs. Russell made us both sit down with a glass of milk. "And I have a special treat for you," she said. I'm not lying. She really said that. I held my breath because of the last special treat at the Daughertys', but it didn't help, because when Mrs. Russell came back, she came back with a loaf of banana bread. Banana bread! And James said, "How about we have some jam with that?" and Mrs. Russell said, "Jam? Then you wouldn't be able to taste the bananas," and James said, "Ma, I hate bananas," and she said, "But I'm sure that Doug enjoys them," and I said, "I think I'm still full from lunch, so the milk's fine," and then Mrs. Russell picked up the plate with the banana bread on it, and you might not believe this, but she started to laugh and laugh a d laugh, until Mr. Russell came out to the kitchen to see what was so funny and she showed him the banana bread and he said, "I hate bananas," and we all started to laugh until Mrs. Russell said, "I hate bananas too," and you can imagine us all laughing until we were crying and finally Mrs. Russell took the banana bread outside to break it up for the birds-"Let's hope they like bananas"-and then I showed Mr. Russell Aaron Copland's Autobiography: Manuscript Edition, and he stopped laughing.

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

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.

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?