Mary E. Pearson Quotations

I am undependable. You might get gritty contemporary with one book, science fiction, magical realism, or high fantasy with another.

I have a manuscript that I'm almost done with, but I've been saying that forever. I'm on what I think will be the second-to-last chapter. It's a story about chance and coincidence.

When I first began writing, and I told people what I wrote, I'd get a blank stare and sometimes a 'Huh?' They weren't sure what young adult literature was. Now everyone knows.

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now.

Fifty years in the future, I should hope we'll be on our second woman president, at least.

I've discovered I love the vast landscape a series offers. I tend to write long anyway, so, it turns out, series gives me the perfect vehicle for writing 'large' stories.

Teens are passionate, questioning, curious, have a bit of the idealism I still cling to, and they're making decisions for the first time that can alter the course of their lives - and sometimes, the course of the world.

Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us.

I thought grandmothers had to like you. It’s a law or something.

I suppose you're right about some perspectives. Just a few weeks ago, I thought you were a dickhead.

It's other people who make us wise, and I haven't known nearly enough.

When your life has had few events to occupy it, it's amazing how a simple encounter can seem like an entire three-act play.

How can you be sure?" "I'm a doctor, Jenna. And a scientist." "Does that make you an authority on everything? What about a soul, Father? When you were so busy implanting all your neural chips, did you think about that? Did you snip my soul from my old body, too? Where did you put it? Show me! Where? Where in all this groundbreaking technology did you insert my soul?

When is a cell finally too small to hold our essence?

He believes me. But that is nothing new. He always did because I was a rule follower. I played by the rules he understood. But there are new rules now, ones he doesn't know yet. He'll learn. Just as I'm learning.

Pieces. Isn't that what all of life is anyway? Shards. Bits. Moments. Am I less because I have fewer, or do the few I have mean more?

There are a lot of memories we imagine. We play them over and over in our minds, trying to orchestrate our movements and words to perfection. Or maybe it's just that I've lived inside of my head more than any other person in the history of the world. Maybe none of us can really predict how we will act at any give moment. Maybe we're all at the mercy of circumstance in spite of our well-laid plans.

Are the details of our lives who we are, or is it owning those details that makes the difference?

But I am more than a name. More than they tell me

Which weakness shall I tell her? “I walk funny,” I say, and she’s satisfied with that. (inside joke)

Father says it will come in time. “Time heals,” he says. I don’t tell him that I don’t know what time is.

My memory is coming back. It is curious how it comes. Each day, a rush of pieces, loosely connected, unimportant bits, snake through me. They click, click, click into my brain, like links being snapped together. And then they are done. A small chain of memories that fill in one tiny part of my life. They come out of nowhere, and most are not important.

The information. Every bit that of information that was ever in your brain. But the information is not the mind Jenna. That we've never accomplished before. What we've done with you is groundbreaking. We cracked the code. The mind is an energy that the brain produces. Think of a glass ball twirling on your fingertip. If it falls, it shatters into a million pieces. All the parts of a ball are still there, but it will never twirl with that force on your fingertip again. The brain is the same way.

Percentages! Those are for economists, polls, and politicians. Percentages can't define your identity.

Do certain events in our lives leave a permanent mark, freezing a piece of us in time, and that becomes a touchstone that we measure the rest of our lives against?

It's the unknown that I fear, the bites of memories that still have no connections.

I used to be someone.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten . . .

There are all kinds of friends you make in life... But there's something different about someone who spreads their wings with you.

The dictionary says my identity should be all about being separate or distinct, and yet it feels like it is so wrapped up in others.

Boredom reigns on all levels. The rain is a welcome change. I have seen the pond swell and the creek surge. I press my palm against the glass, imagining the drops on my skin, imagining where they started out, where they will go, feeling them like a river, rushing, combining, becoming something greater than how they started out.

I just think perfection and lasting through the ages is for Greek statues, not us mere humans.

On a small planet, where minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year, where tradition marches on with a deafening, orderly beat -sometimes the order is disturbed by a dreamer, an artist, a scribbler - sometimes the beat is changed one person at a time.

Maybe there was no one way to define it. Maybe there were as many shades of love as the blues of the sky,

I created an icicle sculpture in the snow. White on white.

Multiple closets for different needs. Overkill.

People will notice the beauty of what they usually ignore ~

But remember, child, we may all have our own story and destiny, and sometimes our seemingly bad fortune, but we're all part of a greater story too. One that transcends the soil, the wind, time even our own tears. Greater stories will have their way.

Maybe we all have a dark place inside of us, a place where dark thoughts and darker dreams live, but it doesn't have to become who we are.

Maybe staying on the surface keeps her from returning to a place where she can't breathe.

... Change doesn't happen overnight-it's molded by people who don't give up

You've always been two people. The Jenna who wants to please and the Jenna who secretly resents in. They won't break, you know. Your parents never thought you were perfect. You did.

Words have longer lives than people.

It can take years to mold a dream. It takes only a fraction of a second for it to be shattered.

Picture yourself five years from now. Where do you want to be? Remember that. Every day. That's how you'll get there.

Maybe the impossible is possible when you take everything else away.

We all have a dark place in us. It's what we do with it and the choice we make.

Escape is not about moving from one place to another. It's about becoming more.

Whatever you choose for your stationery is your favorite color because it's where you pour your heart out.

I still cry on waking. I'm not sure why. I feel nothing. Nothing I can name, anyway. It's like breathing - something that happens over which I have no control. (6)

...and time becomes a forgotten detail.

Where we are going, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be the place that is important but the steps in between.

I think that maybe forgiveness is like change - it comes in small steps. (256)

Things I can feel. Hard. Soft. Rough. Smooth. But the inside kind of feel, it is all the same, like foggy mush. Is that the part of me that is still asleep? (9)

Awareness There is a dark place. A place where I have no eyes, no mouth. No words. I can't cry out because I have no breath. The silence is so deep I want to die. But I can't. The darkness and silence go on forever. It is not a dream. I don't dream.

Pieces. A bit for someone here. A bit there. And sometimes they don't add up to anything whole. But you are so busy dancing. Delivering. You don't have time to notice. Or are afraid to notice. And then one day you have to look. And it's true. All of your pieces fill up other people's holes. But they don't fill your own.

My timing is off. But I had to get it out. Some things you have to tell, no matter how stupid they may sound. Some things you can't save for later. There might not be a later.

I don't want five hundred billion neural chips. I want guts.

Observing and understanding are two different things.

Chance. It weaves through our lives like a golden thread, sometimes knotting, tangling, and breaking along the way. Loose threads are left hanging, but the in and out, the back and forth continues, the weaving goes on. It doesn't stop.

One small changed family doesn't calculate into a world that has been spinning for a billion years. But one small change makes the world spin differently in a billion ways for one family.

When you are perfect, is there anywhere else to go?

I wonder at the weight of a Sparrow.

There is something about her eyes. Eyes don't breathe. I know that much. But hers look breathless.

it is amazin, she thinks, how simple appearances can be created - a rush, a smile, a new coat of paint, a slow, calm voice, a hug, a new dress - a resolve to keep out questions and cling to secrets

Tell me who I am. (29)

Faith and science, I have learned, are two sides of the same coin, separated by an expanse so small, but wide enough that one side can't see the other. They don't know they are connected.

There are many words and definitions I have never lost. But some I am only just beginning to truly understand.

I decide that sometimes definitions are wrong. Even if they're written in a dictionary. Identities aren't always separate and distinct. Sometimes they ARE wrapped up with others. Sometimes, for a few minutes, maybe they can even be shared. And if I am ever fortunate enough to return to Mr. Bender's garden, I wonder if the birds will see that piece of him that is wrapped up in me.

Some things aren't meant to be known. Only believed.

What I think is all I have left. My mind is the only thing that makes me different from a fancy toaster. What we think does matter-it's all we truly have.

Sometimes there's not a better way. Sometimes there's only the hard way.

The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.

Airports and 'leg room' on planes are a form of medieval torture.