Heather's Library

Speak
by Laurie Halse Anderson

p.16 My bed is sending out serious nap rays.

p.30 When the pep rally ends, I am accidentally knocked down three rows of bleachers. If I ever form my own clan, we'll be the Anti-Cheerleaders. We will not sit in the bleachers. We will wander underneath them and commit minor acts of mayhem.

p.30 THE OPPOSITE OF INSPIRATION IS... EXPIRATION?

p.37 STUDENT DIVIDED BY CONFUSION EQUALS ALEGEBRA

p.58 Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner means something to her. It's like a holy obligation, part of what makes her a wife and mother. My family doesn't talk much and we have nothing in common, but if my mother cooks a proper Thanksgiving dinner, it says we will be a family for one more year. Kodak logic. Only in film commercials does stuff like that work.

p.70 I'm just like them--an ordinray drone dressed in secrets and lies.

p.85 Recently she's started sneaking grammar (shudder) into the classroom. One day we worked on verb tenses. "I surf the Net, I surfed the Net, I was surfing the Net." Then, lively adjectives. Does it sound better to say "Nicole's old lacrosse stick hit me in the head" or "Nicole's barf-yellow, gnarled, bloodstained lacrosse stick hit me in the head?" She even tried to teach us the difference between active voice--"I snarfed the Oreos"--and passive voice--"The Oreos got snarfed."

p.122 Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.