Maniac Magee was not born in a dump.
There was a sense that things – words, feelings, laughs – were forever brawling inside her to be the first one out. Now, beside me, I sensed... emptiness. Emptiness in such a person is not nothing, is not small. It is enormous.” -Cammie.
I mean if she’s real, she’s in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who’s really like that is going to last around here?
It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against.
I was feeling nine ways at once, and they all ended up at the touch of her hand on my ear...
I could feel it in myself. I felt lighter, unshackled, as if something I had been carrying had fallen away... I just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals. The pronoun ‘we’ itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.
And I think every once in a while someone comes along who is a little more primitive than the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a little more in touch with the stuff we’re made of.
For hours I lay under my sheet of moonlight. Her voice came through the night, from the light, from the stars.
She taught me to revel She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh.
When you’re nothing, you’re free to believe anything.
Killing the pigeons and putting them out of their misery stubbornly refused to mean the same thing. Palmer thought about misery, and it seemed to him that a shotgun was not the only way to end it. When Palmer was miserable, for example, his mother or father would hold him close and wipe his tears. When Palmer’s mother or father put him out of his misery, they did not shoot him, they offered him a cookie. Why then on Pigeon Day did the people bring guns instead of cookies?
For months she had been everywhere, now she was nowhere.
He said he would try, but I guess he never got the chance. About the last thing I remember him saying was “Don’t worry so much about it. It’s not the sneakers that count, it’s the feet.
She wasn’t gorgeous, wasn’t ugly. A sprinkle of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose. Mostly, she looked like a hundred other girls in school, except for two things, She wore no makeup, and her eyes were the biggest I had ever seen, like deer’s eyes caught in headlights.
Did you ever see a little kid’s face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?
But those pictures and those moments are posed and smiling. They’re not as real as this.
She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the fanciest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl.
And there was more to her seeing than that. What she saw, she felt. Her eyes went straight to her heart.
Like everyone else, he is the star of his own life.
Enchanted places cannot be created, they can only be discovered.
I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life.