Matthew Tobin Anderson Quotes
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It’s the end. It’s the end of the civilization. We’re going down. No, it’s sure not too attractive. Lenticels. I just hope my kids don’t live to see the last days. The things burning and people living in cellars. Violet. The only thing worse than the thought it may all come tumbling down is the thought that we may go on like this forever.
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Whispering makes a narrow place narrower.
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You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.
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There is a power in names. Olakunde told us of ashe-the power which runs through all things, subtle and flexible, which find its most potent expression in human utterance; so that it is a terrible thing to call down imprecations on an enemy, or to wish for anything but good, for what is said out loud is forged into truth.
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We must curb ourfury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation.
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If we're going to ask our kids at age 18 to go off to war and die for their country, I don't see any problem with asking them at age 16 to think about what that might mean.
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I was someone who really loved fantasy novels and science fiction novels.
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Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.
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There are times when friendship feels like running down a hill together as fast as you can, jumping over things, spinning around, and you don't care where you're going, and you don't care where you've come from, because all that matters is speed, and the hands holding your hands.
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I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.
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Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling around inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.
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Then it was this big thing. She was like, 'I never want to see you again', and I was like, 'Fine. Okay? Fine. Then get some special goggles.
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A lot of the drive to make narratives came from having to play by myself as a 5- or 6-year-old in the woods.
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A library is an adjustable wrench for opening the head.
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Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.
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Its a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
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...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.
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You need the noise of your friends in space.
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And I realize that the decision to be human is not one single instant, but is a thousand choices made very day. It is choices we make every second and requires constant vigilance. We have to fight to remain human.
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There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.
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We Americans are interested only in the consumption of our products. We have no interest in how they are produced, or what happens to them once we discard them, once we throw them away.
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At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.
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I am messaging you to say that I love you, and that you're completely wrong about me thinking you're stupid. I always thought you could teach me things. I was always waiting. You're not like the others. You say things that no one expects you to. You think you're stupid. You want to be stupid. But you're someone people could learn from.
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I write for teens partially to work out whatever it was that I needed to from my own teenage years.
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The natural world is so adaptable...So adaptable you wonder what's natural.
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I looked at her, and she was smiling like she was broken.
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I feel like it's hard to get into historical novels where you know what the story is far too well.
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I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.
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Of course, I had my heart broken as a teen. I was desperately in love with myself. Then I found out that I was completely shallow. I haven't spoken to myself since.
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Occasionally people ask me how it is I write different types of things, and my answer to that is it's very natural. You get bored writing one kind of thing all the time.
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