Speak, published in 1999, is a young adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson that tells the story of high school freshman Melinda Sordino. After Melinda is raped at an end of summer party, she calls the police, who break up the party.
Speak Book Quotes
1. “‘When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You’d be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside – walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It’s the saddest thing I know.’”
2. “It is easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.”
3. “This closet is abandoned – it has no purpose, no name. It is the perfect place for me.”
4. “Deprived of Victim, Mom and Dad holler at each other. I turn up the music to drown out the noise.”
5. “I close my eyes, this is what I’ve been dreading. As we leave the last stop, I am the only person sitting alone.”
6. “You don’t like anything. You are the most depressed person I’ve ever met, and excuse me for saying this, but you are no fun to be around and I think you need professional help.”
7. “I want to confess everything, to hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else.”
8. “I see a few friends – people I used to think were my friends – but they look away.”
9. “I don’t want to be cool. I want to grab her by the neck and shake her and scream at her to stop treating me like dirt. She didn’t even bother to find out the truth – what kind of friend is that?”
10. “‘This is where you can find your soul, if you dare. Where you can touch that part of you that you’ve never dared look at before.’”
11. “We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless.”
12. “I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting. It looks like I arm-wrestled a rosebush.”
13. “It wasn’t my fault. He hurt me. It wasn’t my fault. And I’m not going to let it kill me. I can grow.”
14. “They swallow her whole and she never looks back at me. Not once.”
15. “He says a million things without saying a word. I make a note to study David Petrakis. I have never heard a more eloquent silence.”
16. “The tears dissolve the last block of ice in my throat. I feel the frozen stillness melt down through the inside of me, dripping shards of ice that vanish in a puddle of sunlight on the stained floor. Words float up.”
17. “I’m sure I was a huge disappointment. I’m not pretty or smart or athletic. I’m just like them – an ordinary drone dressed in secrets and lies.”
18. “You’re a good kid. I think you have a lot to say. I’d like to hear it.”
19. “I don’t know where you picked up that slacker attitude, but you certainly didn’t learn it at home. Probably from the bad influences up here.”
20. “There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me.”
21. “The way we live ought to manifest the truth of what we believe. A messy life speaks of a messy and incoherent faith.”
22. “Unless a man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention? Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention? If, when the time has come for a commitment, he is not man enough to ask her to marry him, she should give him no reason to presume that she belongs to him.”
