Gayle Forman Quotations

Oftentimes when you see adaptations of books you like, you're let down. As an author, you assume that they are going to suck. A little bit of hope is dangerous.

After graduation, I wanted to work for 'Sassy', which I loved, but it had folded. So I wound up at 'Seventeen' for three years on staff and two as a contributor, and I wrote these great stories that nobody ever believes 'Seventeen' does. Serious stories for teens about social justice issues - gun control, migrant farm workers.

I will go running when I'm stressed out. The running helps, but more than anything, I'll put music on and then I'll run. I'll cry and get it all out.

As we get older, we tend to think it is less OK to be vulnerable and to feel what we feel. It's kind of bull. We all still feel things pretty deeply. It just becomes less socially acceptable to express that.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Many of depression's symptoms - exhaustion, insomnia, nausea, headaches, weight loss, weight gain - are physical ailments.

If the spectrum linking everyday depression to Major Depression sometimes hinders understanding of it, it also offers an opportunity for empathy. Because almost everyone, at some point, experiences feelings of sadness, of hopelessness, of emptiness, not to mention lethargy and irritability.

A good fight scene is really a good love scene.

As an author, I really hate a reader like me. There's no loyalty.

Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.

I can't pretend to be a teenager, but I feel like I never really stopped being a teenager.

I didn't even start college until I was 21.

I don't have a lot of men in my life. I'm married, but I have daughters. I'm surrounded by a lot of females in my world.

I don't know if I actually am good at the sight of blood. An accident on the street gets me very, very upset.

I wrote my first novel when my daughter was about six months old.

John Green was on the set of 'The Fault In Our Stars' the entire time, which is amazing! Wouldn't you want John Green on set the entire time?

Most of us have days or weeks or months so awful, we wish we'd never been born.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

My husband is a former rocker and in charge of our humungous music collection, and I've recently been asking him for classical music.

People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.

'Twilight' is a breathlessly addictive read with a love story that sucks people in.

I don't think I tell stories of tragedy. I think I tell stories of love. Even though you're full of tears, I hope that you leave the theatre with your heart feeling like it's going to explode out of your chest. And yes, you've been through the tragedy, but it's ultimately hope that I think you're left with.

I have written a picture book that is based on my daughters. You know, my youngest one likes to tell everybody, 'Mommy wrote 'Best Day Ever' about us.' Which is true.

I like to relate to my kids as they are. I enjoy spending that time with them. I see that my girls are so completely different and different from me, too.

I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.

So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it's the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.

I think traveling made me who I am. When I was 16, I was an exchange student in England, and that was the year that I kind of feel like I was on the road going one direction in life, and it just kind of shifted me over, and I finished high school, and I went traveling for three more years instead of going to college.

People have told me that they cannot put down 'If I Stay' after reading it, and readers have become very invested in the love story between Adam and Mia.

I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

Forgivenesss: It's a miracle drug. It's God's miracle drug.

There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You've ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can't say any of that.

We like movies and books that give us this emotionally moving experience, where you feel like a slightly different person, and you see the world a little different after you finish. It lets you see your own life in a different way, and it actually makes you feel really good.

When I was really young, I wanted to grow up and be the sun. Which shows an early penchant for ambition or narcissism or grandiosity or delusion - all of which are bellwethers for becoming a writer.

It's not that we like sad movies that make us feel like, 'Oh, my God, what a bummer.' We like emotionally moving experiences. It's nothing new. It's catharsis. It goes back to the Greeks.

I've found that the most engaging and satisfying author events I've done are with other people, where the conversation is spontaneous. I think that is by far the better way to introduce and promote a book.

In order that people who suffer from depression seek treatment without a second thought, the stigmas must further fall until we reach a point in time when that person with leukemia and that person with depression both receive the same level of sympathy and the same level of rigorous treatment. Both people deserve it.

It doesn't rain every day. Just every other day.

I know what I did to you was so wrong, but at the time it also felt so necessary to my survival. I don't know if those two things can both be true, but that's how it was.

The politeness was painful. I wanted to push through it, to return to the glow of the night of the concert, but I was unsure of how to get back there.

I'm also starting to wonder something else. If maybe the point of this crazy quest I'm on wasn't to help me find Willem. Maybe it was to help me find someone else entirely.

I think you're the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. I think you cry in movies that aren't even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don't let it show. I think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.

And this is the truth. Because I may be only eighteen, but it already seems pretty obvious that the world is divided into two groups: the doers and the watchers. The people things happen to and the rest of us, who just sort of plod on with things. The Lulus and the Allysons. It never occurred to me that by pretending to be Lulu, I might slip into that other column, even for just a day.

Willem holds my wrist for a long moment, looking at that birthmark. Then he lifts it to his mouth. And though his lips are soft and his kiss is gentle, it feels like a knife jamming into the electrical socket. It feels like the moment when I go live

Travelling's not something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.

It's ok if you want to stop fighting.

I’ve blamed her for all of this, for leaving, for ruining me. And maybe that was the seed of it, but from that one little seed grew this tumor of a flowering plant. And I’m the one who nurtures it. I water it. I care for it.I nibble from its poison berries. I let it wrap around my neck, choking the air right out of me. I’ve done that. All by myself. All to myself.

If I stay. If I live. It's up to me.

Willem tsk-tsks. "You Americans are so violent. I'm Dutch. The worst I will do is run her over with a bicycle.

He gives me a little shrug, like, of course, why else? And at this point, I really have no right to be surprised by people's capacity for kindness and generosity, but still, I am. I'm floored every time.

It's nice, this. The canal." He looks at me. "You." "I'll bet you say that to all the canals.

A thousand suns rise from my chest.

Even if you find him. Even if he didn’t leave you on purpose, he can’t possibly live up to the person you’ve built him into.

Because for that day, I really did become Lulu. Maybe not from the film or the real Louise Brooks, but my own idea of what Lulu represented. Freedom. Daring. Adventure. Saying yes.

I think of me and Melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. No matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we always let go. But after we bobbed to the surface, we'd climb out of the pool, clamber up the high-dive ladder, clasp hands, and do it again. We're swimming separately now. I get that. Maybe it's just what you have to do to keep above water. But who knows? Maybe one day, we'll climb out, grab hands, and jumo again.

This is myself, baby. All of my selves. I own each and every one of them. I know who I'm pretending to be and who I am." The look he gives me is withering. "Do you?

Closure. I loathe that word.

That’s the thing you never expect about grieving, what a competition it is.

Adam lay perfectly still, little groans escaping from his lips. I looked at the bow, looked at my hands, looked at Adam's face and felt this surge of love, lust, and an unfamiliar feeling of power.

I don't know how to be a friend. I don't know how to be anything.

...no way through it but through it," I tell myself.

Dear Willem: I’ve been trying to forget about you and our day in Paris for nine months now, but as you can see, it’s not going all that well. I guess more than anything, I want to know, did you just leave? If you did, it’s okay. I mean it’s not, but if I can know the truth, I can get over it. And if you didn’t leave, I don’t know what to say. Except I’m sorry that I did. I don’t know what your response will be at getting this letter, like a ghost from your past. But no matter what happened, I hope you’re okay.

I realize it’s not just Willem I’m looking for; it’s Lulu too.

No one is who they pretend to be

Fake it till you make it actually worked.

I know that all the magic kisses in the world probably couldn't have helped him today. But I would do anything to have been able to give him one.

The audience keeps singing, keeps making my case, and I just keep strumming until I get close enough to see her eyes. And then I start singing the chorus. Right to her. And she smiles at me, and it’s like we’re the only two people out here, the only ones who know what’s happening. Which is that this song we’re all singing together is being rewritten. It’s no longer an angry plea shouted to the void. Right here, on this stage, in front of eighty thousand people, it’s becoming something else. This is our new vow.

When I was little, I used to go to the local ice-skating rink. In my mind, I always felt like I could twirl and jump, but when I got out onto the ice, I could barely keep my blades straight. When I got older, that's how it was with people: In my mind, I am bold and forthright, but what comes out always seems to be so meek and polite. Even with Evan, my boyfriend for junior and most of senior year, I never quite managed to be that skating, twirling, leaping person I suspected I could be. But today, apparently, I can skate.

Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life. Maybe that's the thing with liberation. It comes at a price.

Part of me knows one more day won't do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.

It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. - Adam

Or maybe it's not a miracle. Maybe this is just life. When you open yourself up to it. When you put yourself in the path of it. When you say yes.

C'est courageux d'aller dans l'inconnu': It is courageous to go into territory unknown.

You're just trying on different identities, like everyone in those Shakespeare plays. And the people we pretend at, they're already in us. That's why we pretend them in the first place.

Are you coming down with something?" Mom asks. And just for the tiniest of seconds, I wonder what would happen if I told them the truth. That school is nothing like I imagined it would be. That I'm not the girl in the catalog at all. I'm not a Happy College Student. I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

It's funny the things you think you're scared of until they're upon you, and then you're not.

I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don't put yourself in the path of it, you miss it.

(P)eople’s good intentions can wind up putting us in boxes as confining as coffins.

Even going to jail would be easy compared to losing you.

Love can make you immortal

If I stay. If I live. It’s up to me. All this business about medically induced comas is just doctor talk. It’s not up to the doctors. It’s not up to the absentee angels. It’s not even up to God who, if He exists, is nowhere around right now. It’s up to me.

Mia and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had she not been some cello prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise - or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this -I was pretty sure it would've been.

I realize then that it's not enough to know what someone is called. You have to know who they are.

But then Mason touches my neck, to the spot on it where the cut from that night has since healed, and I pull away. He was right, after all; it didn't leave a scar, though part of me wishes it had. At least I'd have some evidence, some justification of this permanence. Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them.

My first impulse is not to grab her or kiss her or yell at her. I simple want to touch her cheek, still flushed from the night's performance. I want to cut through the space that separates us, measured in feet-not miles, not continents, not years-and to take a callused finger to her face.

She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Byrn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me.

Neither sleet nor rain nor a half inch of snow will compel me to dress like a lumberjack.

Whoever said that the past isn't dead had it backward. It's the future that's already dead, already played out.

He showed me how to get lost, and then I showed myself how to get found.

Stains are even worse when you're the only one who can see them.

Mia,” Kim said, an edge of warning in her voice signaling the end of her patience. “You’re starting to act like one of those girls. Do you need to get me a gun?

What is the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

In that twisted incestuous way of fate, Mia's a part of our history, and we're among the shards of her legacy.

In the middle of L.A.'s sunny non-winter, I need to sit in a dark closet to feel right.

Why get stained when getting dirty is so much more fun

He can't possibly live up to the person you've built him to be

And I kissed him back so hard, like I was trying to merge our bodies through our lips.

Bribes are the glue that's kept teenagers and parents connected for generations

It was just one day and it's been just one year. But maybe one day is enough. Maybe one hour is enough. Maybe time has nothing at all to do with it". Willem