Stargirl Quotes January 9, 2008

Disclaimer: I do not own the copyright of any of the two books: Stargirl and Love, Stargirl.

I absolutely love Jerry Spinelli’s books Stargirl and Love, Stargirl! Stargirl aka Susan Caraway is my hero. In a very weird and unexpected way, she saved me from an utterly meaningless and passionless life. The Stargirl book is like my sacred and holy book. I have read it a million times and I do not cease to find beauty in it.

And since I love it so much, I thought I’d share lines from the books which I think, feel and know speak some truth.

BOOK: Stargirl

Stargirl

• “I pledge allegiance to United Turtles of America and to the fruit bats of Borne, one planet in the Milky Way, incredible, with justice and black bean burritos for all.”
• “Because I didn’t feel like Susan anymore.” –when asked why she changed her name
• “I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.”
• “I root for everybody!“
• “Nothing’s more fun than being carried away.”
• “You were smitten with me. You were speechless to behold my beauty. You had never met anyone so fascinating. You thought of me every waking minute. You dreamed about me. You couldn’t stand it. You couldn’t let such wonderfulness out of your sight. You had to follow me.”
• “Nobody has the time. The time cannot be owned. Time is free to everyone!”
• “It (enchantment) started when the earth was born. It never stops. It is, always. It’s just here.”
• “It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a whole commotion going on inside us.”
• “The earth is speaking to us, but we can’t hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then–maybe–the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.”
• “I’m erased. I’m gone. I’m nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl…. And… I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.”

Leo

• “In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of say, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.”
• “We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against. She was unknown territory. Unsafe. We were afraid to get too close.”
• “It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against. For ourselves. For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long.”
• “We wagged our head and agreed what a goofy girl this was, maybe even officially crazy, but we walked away smiling and maybe not saying but all thinking the same thing: it felt good to get credit.”
• “She did not seem to notice. Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things did not stick to her. Our bad things stuck very much to her…. All of her feelings, all of her attentions flowed outward. She had no ego.”
• “She was the opposite of cool; she held nothing back.”

Archie

• “My school is everywhere and always in session.”
• “On the contrary, she is one of us. Most decidedly. She is us more than we are us. She is, I think, who we really are. Or were.”
• “She’s anything but. She’s an earthling if there ever was one.”
• “If anybody is acting, it’s us. She’s as real as–as real as Barney.”
• “Every name is real. That’s the nature of names.”
• “Maybe that’s how names ought to be, heh? Why be stuck with just one your whole life?”
• “You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.”
• “The trouble with miracles is, they don’t last long.”
• “How did this girl come to be? I used to ask myself. Sometimes I thought she should be teaching me. She seems to be in touch with something that the rest of us are missing.”
• “You know, there’s a place we all inhabit, but we don’t much think about it, we’re scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day…. It’s in the morning, for most of us. It’s that time, those few seconds when we’re coming out of sleep but we’re not really awake yet. For those few seconds we’re something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then… and then–ah–we open our eyes and the days is before us, and–we become ourselves.”

More quotes from Love, Stargirl.