A Quote by Wendelin Van Draanen

And now I was seeing that there was something really cool about that family. All of them. They were just...real. And who were we? There was something spinning wickedly out of control inside this house. It was like seeing inside the Baker's world had opened up windows into our own, and the view was not a pretty one. Where had all this stuff come from? And why hadn't I ever seen it before.
Corsets do look so pretty. Once I watched it, I was like, "Well, they do look nicer than the way I do normally," but they're really uncomfortable. You start to realize why women would pass out. We had the real ones, and they were just awful. At one point, I was like, "I think that's my spleen that this is digging into." So, if I had a nightgown, that was always really comfy. I had a few coats that I thought were pretty cool.
Seeing movies about mental illness, a lot of falseness has leapt out at me over the years... So I just focused on what I remembered, the real experience of seeing somebody like that. And as an adult, I’ve had family members who are bipolar, so I’ve seen it again.
Those who were on the inside, the majority that is, for them it had been hard to get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the inside, that they were the fittest. For those on the outside, the fear and abandonment amounts to almost everything; everybody knows that. Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline.
Even though I knew I was inside the space shuttle getting ready to go fly, something about it wasn't completely real up until we got the call at about one minute to go, to close and lock our visors and start our oxygen flow. People often ask me, "What did it feel like right at the moment of launch?" And they're surprised when I tell them actually what I felt was relief. It wasn't like being anxious or scared or anything. It was relief because this is something I had wanted to do my whole life and now that the boosters had lit, we were on our way to go do it and nothing was going to stop us.
I think the best thing about being pregnant would definitely have to be seeing just my belly grow and seeing, like, wow, there is, you know, something inside of me.
When my friends and I grew up, we had 'Full House,' 'Growing Pains' and 'Roseanne.' These sitcoms were about something, about real people in a sense. They sort of super-sized real life where things aren't necessarily exactly how you go through them in daily life, but you can relate to something, and you can pull something out of it.
I was born in 1935, so I was quite young when the war started. I remember we were in Bath, and it was 1942. We went down into the cellar of our house, and when we came up, I remember seeing all the glass on the floor where all the windows had been shaken out by the bombs.
Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience.
We had a teacher, named Mr. Brown, and he was writing something on the board once - he was writing something on the board, and he farted. And you would have thought kids had seen the face of God. Kids weren't even laughing; they were just sitting there screaming, just screaming. Kids had to get carted out; kids were screaming. Kids had to get carted out, and they were going to the nurses' office. Kids are crying in the hallway. 'Oh, this is our 9/11.' And it was. It was their 9/11 'cause they never thought anything like that could ever happen.
My favourite book as a child was an old 'Newne's Children's Encyclopaedia' which my grandfather had bought just before World War II and donated to our family after seeing how interested we were in it. Each volume had special chapters called 'Things Boys can Do.' My brothers and I would pick out interesting projects.
Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.
I felt as if I had no control over what I said, as if loathsome, ugly words were waiting inside me like snakes and toads looking for a chance to sneak out before I could stop them.
The idea of going to the movies made Hugo remember something Father had once told him about going to the movies when he was just a boy, when the movies were new. Hugo's father had stepped into a dark room, and on a white screen he had seen a rocket fly right into the eye of the man in the moon. Father said he had never experienced anything like it. It had been like seeing his dreams in the middle of the day.
He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.
What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn't just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right - we had many families over time. Our family of origion, the family we created, as well as the gorups you moved thorugh while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn't expect them to be. You couldn't make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.
Anyone who's ever had the misfortune of seeing me interact with house pets knows I have a wickedly strong paternal instinct bordering on the maternal.
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