Robert Cormier Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

Pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.

Robert Cormier
There are moments that stop the heart, that catch the breath, that halt the beat of blood in your veins, and you are suspended in time, held between life and death, and you wait for something to bring you back again.

Robert Cormier
You could reason with someone who was halfway educated and appeal to his intelligence, but I felt helpless in the face of utter stupidity.

Robert Cormier
You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.

Robert Cormier
A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.

Robert Cormier
It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.

Robert Cormier
I don't mean to be insolent. I'm truthful. I tell the truth and the truth sometimes hurts. For instance, you have bad breath, Lieutenant. I can smell it from here. It must offend a lot of people. That's the truth. But how many people have told you that? Instead, they either lie or try to avoid your company.

Robert Cormier
I have always pondered a tragic law of adolescence. (On second thought, the law probably applies to all ages to some extent). That law: People fall in love at the same time — often at the same stunning moment — but they fall out of love at different times. One is left sadly juggling the pieces of a fractured heart while the other has danced away.

Robert Cormier
Do I dare disturb the universe? Yes, I do, I do. I think. Jerry suddenly understood the poster—the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.

Robert Cormier
Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.

Robert Cormier
The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth — love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?

Robert Cormier
It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

Robert Cormier
Everybody sins.... The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.

Robert Cormier
It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it.

Robert Cormier
Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.

Robert Cormier
He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine — not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.

Robert Cormier
A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.

Robert Cormier
People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.

Robert Cormier
He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.

Robert Cormier
Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.

Robert Cormier