Maureen Johnson Quotes

“I decided to deflect her attitude by giving a long, Southern answer. I come from people who know how to draw things out. Annoy a Southerner, and we will drain away the moments of your life with our slow, detailed replies until you are nothing but a husk of your former self and that much closer to death.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Name of the Star

“Maybe you've never fallen into a frozen stream. Here's what happens.
1. It is cold. So cold that the Department of Temperature Acknowledgment and Regulation in you brain gets the readings and says, "I can't deal with this. I'm out of here." It puts up the OUT TO LUNCH sign and passes all responsibility to the...
2. Department of Pain and the Processing Thereof, which gets all this gobbledygook from the temperature department that it can't understand. "This is so not our job," it says. So it just starts hitting random buttons, filling you with strange and unpleasant sensations, and calls the...
3. Office of Confusion and Panic, where there is always someone ready to hop on the phone the moment it rings. This office is at least willing to take some action. The Office of Confusion and Panic loves hitting buttons.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

“The funny thing about stop signs is that they're also start signs.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Key to the Golden Firebird

“Just then, my phone started ringing. The ring must have been damaged by the water as well, so now it had a high, keening note - kind of the sound I imagine a mermaid might make if you punched her in the face.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

“WORTH IT and perfect are different things. No one’s perfect, yet in romance, everyone becomes WORTH IT. And that’s the trick.”
― Maureen Johnson

“Maureen clapped her hands together. "Oh," she said in her elfin little voice. "It's pretty."
"Pretty?" Simon looked quickly at the hunched shape on top of the concrete block. "Maureen, what the hell-”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“It was as if the news itself wanted to reassure me. Even Jack the Ripper himself had reappeared as part of the greeting committee.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Name of the Star

“It was probably a good idea to have you possible future stepmother think you were a little nuts. It would keep her on her toes and dissuade her from trying to sit down and have touchy-feely talks. Not that she expected that from Julia. Julia looked like she might head-butt people in meetings.”
― Maureen Johnson

“With a drowning kind of quiet”
― maureen johnson, Let It Snow

“But there was some life in the thing”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“But I was fuelled by the power of confusion and panic, which, like I said is always ready and waiting to get to work.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“The sky was white instead of the crazy pink of the night before.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Who had just witnessed me go through an entire rainbow of emotions and experiences.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“The regret and humiliation hurt much more than the cold.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Told me not to sell my self short”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Told her I would wait as long as it took. She told me not to bother, but I waited anyway.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Didn’t say we tell each other everything”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Good resume,” he said, not sounding all that impressed. “But what’s he like?” Oh, God. This conversation was going to go on.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Personality-wise. Is he secretly a poet or something? Does he dance around his room when he thinks no one is looking? Is he funny, like you? What’s his essence?”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“But...he had had a long night, and it seemed a waste to force my story on him when he was half asleep.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Sometimes, I just didn’t get Noah. Sometimes I even felt like he dated me as part of his plan, like they were going to have a checklist on the application, and one of the things to tick off was going to be, “Do you have a reasonably intelligent girlfriend who shares your aspirations, and who is fully prepared to accept your limited availability? One who likes to listen to you talk about your own accomplishments for hours at a time?”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“He still looked handsome. Not in the same way as Noah. Noah wasn’t flawless. He had no single amazing feature. Instead, he had a confluence of agreeable aspects that were accepted by one and all to add up to one very attractive whole, perfectly packaged in the right clothes.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“My memories of the last year were playing back through my mind at super-speed, but I was looking at them all from a different camera angle.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“He was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t hide upstairs forever. Sooner or later, I was going to have to come down and face the world.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“Which was precisely what I had to do. Go away. Get out of this house and his life while I still had a shred of dignity left.”
― Maureen Johnson, Let It Snow

“He’s...like what I just said.”
― Maureen Johnson

“We're currently in the vortex of an extended emergency. Every day feels like waking up from a perfectly boring dream to the realization that you've been sleeping on the cliffs of Mordor. Giving this moment anything less than your all is the equivalent of hitting the snooze button.”
― Lauren DeLuca

“Trying is the first step to whatever comes next.”
― Maureen Johnson, The Vanishing Stair

“I wrote the first book, and then I forgot how to write. It used to be that I would sit and write, and I would go into some other world--I could see it all. I was totally in another place. But the second it became something I had to do, something in me broke.”
― Maureen Johnson, Truly, Devious