Quotes from Andrew Smith

And that was my day. You know what I mean.

I think everyone's an arrow like that, too, aiming into their own centers.

Progress will only get a guy so far, and it will never move beyond the wall of extinction.

Over a hundred years ago, we learned in a stupid little place that used to be called Vietnam that wars are absolutely useless for trying to change people. Who the fuck ever thought you could go to war to change people, as opposed to just obliterating them? Dumb as fuck. The only good think about wars is starting them. Because you sure as fuck can't win 'em anymore.

People fear what they don't understand and hate what they can't conquer.

You know, nothing ever goes back exactly the way it was. Things just expand and contract. Like the universe, like breathing. But you'll never fill your lungs up with the same air twice. Sometimes, it would be cool if you could pause and rewind and do over. But I think anyone would get tired of that after one or two times.

I was thinking. What if the world was like one of those Russian nesting dolls? What if we only saw one surface of it, the outside, but there was all kinds of other stuff going on, too? All the time. Underneath. But we just don't see it, even if we're part of it? Even if we're in it? And what if you had a chance to see a different layer, like flipping a channel or something? Would you want to look? Even if what you saw looked like hell? Or worse?

Expired condoms are like nuclear waste: there's nothing sensible you can do with it.

When I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind's eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Alan Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple yet miraculous fact they they were there and alive in that moment, and so was he.

I said a silent prayer. Actually, silent is probably the only type of prayer a guy should attempt when his head's in a toilet.

People fear what they can not understand and what they can not control.

Had (President) Kennedy turned to his advisers and wailed, "What can we beat the Russians at?" and if someone had cried "Backgammon!" at that point, Apollo would never have happened.

The same words that make the horrible things come also tell the quieter things about love.

There's no prison worse than "I promise.

I suppose the things that transform your life don't appear as you fancifully imagine they will.

But when I was quiet...that made words too. The same words that make horrible things come also tell the quieter things about love.

And you can't see around corners. so you just have to deal with it, and try to stay afloat. And things get tough. And you're supposed to grow up. And it's all a bunch of bullshit. Sorry.

Santa Claus is a lie but if you think that's bad, check out what 'fuck' really means.

It's no wonder I became a monster, too.

Not a very pretty world, is it?" "Which one?

A world between my fingers.

YOU KNOW HOW WHEN you're a senior in high school, and you officially know absolutely everything about everything and no one can tell you different, but on the other hand, at the same time, you're dumber than a poorly translated instruction manual for a spoon?

The end of the world was one week old and it was getting out of hand.

Apollo has something to teach us as we enter a new century of genetic modification, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology. It's a cautionary tale about that most fundamentally human of human tragedies .. wanting something so badly that you end up destroying it.