Dead End in Norvelt Quotes

“...who proved that you don't have to do what your parents want, or what your boyfriend wants, for you to be happy. You just have to be yourself, for there is no love greater than self love”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“Don't ever forget your history," she sang, "or any wicked soul can lie to you and get away with it.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“Don't ever go to war. Even if you win, the battle is never over inside you.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“...we have to save the history we have. You never know what small bit of it might change your life--or change the whole world.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“...but every living soul is a book of their own history, which sits on the ever-growing shelf in the library of human memories.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“I could see everything she said as if it were a wall painting inside the cave of my own skull.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“Not romantic," she disagreed. "To me it would be romantic if Antony properly fell on his sword and kicked the bucket and Cleopatra escaped and lived a lovely life sailing along the Nile without him and his big ideas ruining her kingdom.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“School was finally out and I was standing on a picnic table in our backyard getting ready for a great summer vacation when my mother walked up to me and ruined it.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“You want to know a secret?” I asked. “Sure,” she said halfheartedly. “I love to sniff the insides of books,” I said in a whisper. “Because each book has its own special perfume.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“Well, don’t fart or you’ll scare the deer,” he continued seriously. “They have very sensitive noses and ears.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“You’re a fast learner,” she remarked. “You’ve gone from slowpoke to safety hazard in one day.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“Be suspicious of history that is written by the conquerors.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“Miss Volker,” I said about as politely as I knew how, “do you think you will outlast the rest of these original people?” “I have to,” she said. “I made a promise to Eleanor Roosevelt to see them to their graves, and I can’t drop dead on the job—so let’s get going.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“About fifty yards ahead a white-tailed deer was slowly picking his way across the snow-covered rocks and roots. As soon as I saw him I knew instantly that I didn’t want him to die. He was so beautiful and at ease in the woods. This was his home, not mine, and I suddenly felt like a killer who had broken into his house and was about to shoot him. I watched and held my breath.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“When I was first getting to know her we were in a viewing room at the funeral parlor looking at a new line of cigar-shaped caskets that were called “Time Capsules of the Future.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“Money is just a way of measuring work, but you don’t need money if everyone agrees that trading one kind of work for another will do just as well.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“He’s so stupid. Honestly, when he makes alphabet soup it spells out D-U-M-B.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“Oh sweet cheeze-us!” I wailed, and dropped butt-first onto the table. “Ohhh! Cheeze-us-crust!” I”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“I”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“Title Page Dedication”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“School was finally out and I was standing”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)

“There were tiny loaves for dolls, and warm dinner rolls, and long French bread, and braided rings of bread, and thick loaves as big and round as wagon wheels, and even entire wheat-colored cottages of crusty bread which when you lived in them were more like yeasty caves in a gigantic mountain of bread, and all you had to do in order to feed your self in heaven was pull a hank of soft, moist bread right out of the wall.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“But here in Norvelt we had one of those librarians who collected the tiniest books of human history. Mrs. Hamsby, who died yesterday at age seventy-seven, was the first postmistress of Norvelt and she saved all the lost letters, those scraps of history that ended up as undeliverable in a quiet corner of Norvelt. But they were not unwanted. Mrs. Hamsby carefully pinned each envelope to the wall, so that the rooms of her house were lined from floor to ceiling with letter upon letter, and when you arrived for tea it appeared as if the walls were papered with the overlapping scales of an ancient fish. You were always welcome to unpin any envelope and read the orphaned letter, as if you were browsing in a library full of abandoned histories.
Each room has its own mosif of stamps, so that the parlor room is papered with huamn stamps as if people such as Lincoln, or Queen Elizabeth, or Joan of Arc had come to visit. The bedroom has the stamps of lovely landscapes you might discover in your dreams, and the bathroom has stamps with oceans and rivers and rain. Each stamp is a snapshot of a story, of one thin slice of history captured like an ant in amber. there is history in every blink of an eye, and Mrs. Hamsby knew well that within the lost letter was the folded soul of the writer wrapped in the body of the envelope and mailed into the unknown. And for this tiny museum of lost hisotry we citizens of Norvelt thank her.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“when we passed the Hells Angels clubhouse they were giving cans of beer out to little kids. “Repeat after me,” ordered a drunken Hells Angel dressed as a Viking warrior. “When I grow up I’m going to be a badass.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt: (Newbery Medal Winner)