Part of me becomes the characters I’m writing about. I think readers feel like they are there, the way I am, as a result.
That’s the Little Dipper. Hey, Armpit, what sign are you?” “This is my sign,” Armpit said, and gave him the finger.
He sometimes daydreamed about sitting beside her in a beautiful meadow and just counting her freckles.
He didn’t want her to know that he didn’t understand, but what he didn’t realize was that she didn’t understand either, so that if he had just told her he didn’t understand, she would have understood, but when he told her he understood, then she didn’t understand.
Tired,” said Jason. “S-L-E-E-P-Y. Tired.
If a donkey could talk, and if the donkey had a sore throat, and if it spoke with a French accent – that was what Mr. Gorf’s voice sounded like.
She was on the outside here too, just like at school. Even in the circular room, with all the fish swimming around her, she was on the outside. She was in the middle, but on the outside.
Your parents are just trying to do what’s best for you,” said Carla. “A lot of people think counselors don’t belong in schools.” She shrugged. “I guess they’re afraid I might full your head with all kinds of crazy ideas.
They had never had a nice teacher. They were terribly afraid of nice teachers.
In fact, they were much too cute to be children.
Yes,” Leslie agreed. “Rondi showed excellent taste by not wearing the hat or the boots. They go so well together.
If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy.
Some libraries have separate areas for fiction and nonfiction. Mrs. Surlaw didn’t believe in that sort of thing. After all, who was she to decide what was true and what wasn’t?
Some hunters like to shoot ostriches that have their heads buried in the sand.
David shared his worktable with a girl.
He stared at the clock. Sometimes, it seemed the hands didn’t move at all. Other times, he’d blink, and it would be half an hour later. Time didn’t always make sense at Wayside School.
Lucy hugged my uncle as she gushed about how wonderful it was to see him playing bridge again. Then she got all flustered and apologetic because she had used the word see. “It’s all right, Lucy,” Trapp assured her. “I’m aware you have the ability to see me, even if I can’t see you.
This was the eighteenth day in a row that the special was Mushroom Surprise. It was called Mushroom Surprise because it would have been a surprise if anybody had ever ordered it. No one ever did – except Louis, of course. That’s why they’d had it for eighteen days. There was always plenty left over.
Sadly, in these rush-rush, hurry-hurry days, not too many young people study the art of paper clip bending. There are only a handful of master benders left in the whole world. And who knows, in ten or twenty years there might not be any. Everyone will have to switch to staples.
There were stairs that led down to the basement, too, but nobody ever went down there. There were dead rats living in the basement.
Passed away” seemed like an appropriate way of putting it. Over the next few days, I had this recurring image of Trapp sitting at the bridge table. He reaches into the bidding box, removes a pass card, and places it on the table. Then he slowly vanishes.