Gayle Forman Quotations

Oftentimes when you see adaptations of books you like, you're let down. As an author, you assume that they are going to suck. A little bit of hope is dangerous.

After graduation, I wanted to work for 'Sassy', which I loved, but it had folded. So I wound up at 'Seventeen' for three years on staff and two as a contributor, and I wrote these great stories that nobody ever believes 'Seventeen' does. Serious stories for teens about social justice issues - gun control, migrant farm workers.

I will go running when I'm stressed out. The running helps, but more than anything, I'll put music on and then I'll run. I'll cry and get it all out.

As we get older, we tend to think it is less OK to be vulnerable and to feel what we feel. It's kind of bull. We all still feel things pretty deeply. It just becomes less socially acceptable to express that.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

Many of depression's symptoms - exhaustion, insomnia, nausea, headaches, weight loss, weight gain - are physical ailments.

If the spectrum linking everyday depression to Major Depression sometimes hinders understanding of it, it also offers an opportunity for empathy. Because almost everyone, at some point, experiences feelings of sadness, of hopelessness, of emptiness, not to mention lethargy and irritability.

A good fight scene is really a good love scene.

As an author, I really hate a reader like me. There's no loyalty.

Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.

I can't pretend to be a teenager, but I feel like I never really stopped being a teenager.

I didn't even start college until I was 21.

I don't have a lot of men in my life. I'm married, but I have daughters. I'm surrounded by a lot of females in my world.

I don't know if I actually am good at the sight of blood. An accident on the street gets me very, very upset.

I wrote my first novel when my daughter was about six months old.

John Green was on the set of 'The Fault In Our Stars' the entire time, which is amazing! Wouldn't you want John Green on set the entire time?

Most of us have days or weeks or months so awful, we wish we'd never been born.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

My husband is a former rocker and in charge of our humungous music collection, and I've recently been asking him for classical music.

People often call 'If I Stay' my baby novel, and I have to correct them. It's not my first book. It's just the first one anybody paid attention to.

'Twilight' is a breathlessly addictive read with a love story that sucks people in.

I don't think I tell stories of tragedy. I think I tell stories of love. Even though you're full of tears, I hope that you leave the theatre with your heart feeling like it's going to explode out of your chest. And yes, you've been through the tragedy, but it's ultimately hope that I think you're left with.

I have written a picture book that is based on my daughters. You know, my youngest one likes to tell everybody, 'Mommy wrote 'Best Day Ever' about us.' Which is true.

I like to relate to my kids as they are. I enjoy spending that time with them. I see that my girls are so completely different and different from me, too.

I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.

So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it's the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.

People have told me that they cannot put down 'If I Stay' after reading it, and readers have become very invested in the love story between Adam and Mia.

I think traveling made me who I am. When I was 16, I was an exchange student in England, and that was the year that I kind of feel like I was on the road going one direction in life, and it just kind of shifted me over, and I finished high school, and I went traveling for three more years instead of going to college.

I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

There are so many things that demand to be said. Where did you go? Do you ever think about me? You've ruined me. Are you okay? But of course, I can't say any of that.

Forgivenesss: It's a miracle drug. It's God's miracle drug.

We like movies and books that give us this emotionally moving experience, where you feel like a slightly different person, and you see the world a little different after you finish. It lets you see your own life in a different way, and it actually makes you feel really good.

When I was really young, I wanted to grow up and be the sun. Which shows an early penchant for ambition or narcissism or grandiosity or delusion - all of which are bellwethers for becoming a writer.

I've found that the most engaging and satisfying author events I've done are with other people, where the conversation is spontaneous. I think that is by far the better way to introduce and promote a book.

In order that people who suffer from depression seek treatment without a second thought, the stigmas must further fall until we reach a point in time when that person with leukemia and that person with depression both receive the same level of sympathy and the same level of rigorous treatment. Both people deserve it.

It's not that we like sad movies that make us feel like, 'Oh, my God, what a bummer.' We like emotionally moving experiences. It's nothing new. It's catharsis. It goes back to the Greeks.

Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.

There’s a difference between losing something you knew you had and losing something you discovered you had. One is a disappointment. The other feels like losing a piece of yourself.

Sometimes you make choices in life and sometimes choices make you.

Don't be scared...Women can handle the worst kind of pain. You'll find out one day.

But the you who you are tonight is the same you I was in love with yesterday, the same you I’ll be in love with tomorrow.

I'm so tired of missing things I don't have.

I'll be your mess, you be mine That was the deal that we had signed

I needed to hate someone and you’re the one I love the most, so it fell on you.

We can change in one day. We can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in one day.

Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill.

You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it's out of your control -Mia

Sacrifice, that's what we do for the people we love.

The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.

...the world feels so big when you're out in the wide open. It's like you don't have a place in it when you don't have a home." "Your place is right here," I whispered, laying down and hugging her close.

And something tells me if it matters, maybe it shouldn't be easy.

I have a feeling that once you live through something like this, you become a little bit invincible.

And that's just it, isn't it? That's how we manage to survive the loss. Because love, it never dies, it never goes away, it never fades, so long as you hang on to it.

I don't know who I am. Or maybe I do know who I am and I just don't want to be her anymore.

...being Lulu, it made me realize that all my life I've been living in a small, square room, with no windows and no doors. And I was fine. I was happy, even. I thought. Then someone came along and showed me there was a door in the room. One that I'd never even seen before. Then he opened it for me. Held my hand as I walked through it. And for one perfect day, I was on the other side. I was somewhere else. Someone else. And then he was gone, and I was thrown back into my little room. And now, no matter what I do, I can't seem to find that door.

It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.

I understood all that in my head, but I still didn‟t believe it in my heart.

Something given, something taken away. Does it always have to work like that?

If I felt like a fish out of water in my family, I felt like a fish on Mars in Adam’s circle.

Accidents. It's all about the accidents.

Forward momentum. That's my new motto. No regrets. And no going back.

Sometimes the best way to find out what you’re supposed to do is by doing the thing you’re not supposed to do.

Because I understand all the ways of trying to escape, how sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.

Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith.

Sometimes the wind blows you places you weren't expecting: sometimes it blows you away from those places, too.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have had her company in my head—the comfort that would’ve brought.

Losing me will hurt; it will be the kind of pain that won't feel real at first, and when it does, it will take her breath away.

The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides. Which I think is a rather handy metaphor for falling in love.

All night long if you want. We'll tell our secrets to the dark.

A day might just be twenty-four hours but sometimes getting through one seems as impossible as scaling Everest.

Sometimes we meet people and are so symbiotic with them, it's as if we are one person, with one mind, one destiny

I want to make her cry and then lick up the tears.

I recognized that the kiss was a door I had walked through.

Her eyes flutter up to meet mine. “Are you hungry?”she asks. Am I ever.

I’ve been feeling something else. Like I’m about to be sucked into something powerful and painful.

Anything that kills hope is a sin

I`m surrounded by people and feel alone.

Love is not something you protect. It’s something you risk.

It's like the piano and the cello are being poured into my body, the same way the IV and blood transfusions are. And the memories of my life as it was, and the flashes of it as it might be, are coming so fast and furious. I feel like I can no longer keep up with them but they keep coming and everything is colliding, until I cannot take anymore. Until I cannot be like this a second longer.

..all I left with was the magnitude of my mistake, of my missing you. And I have to watch you from this distance, watch you achieve your dreams, live what seemed like this perfect life.

If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they'd tell.

Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song.

Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind.

Needle and thread flesh and bone Spit and sinew, heartbreak is home. Your suture lines, they sparkle like diamonds Bright stars to light my confinement “Stitch,

You have to fall in love to be in love, but falling in love isn't the same as being in love

Loving someone is such an inherently dangerous act. And yet, love, that’s where safety lives.

I actually feel something in my chest open, a feeling so intense, it’s like my heart’s about to burst. And I just let it. I just let it out.

We kiss again. This next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I've had in my life has been wrong.

But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.

Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too.

In the lead-up to the launch of my new book I Was Here, I’ve seen a lot of discussion about depression and suicide and mental health and YA dealing with such intense matters. What I haven’t seen discussed is kittens.

You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone.

All relationships are tough. Just like with music, sometimes you have harmony and other times you have cacophony.

What would you do if you had to choose?

Girlfriend is such a stupid word. I couldn't stand calling her that. So, we had to get married, so I could call her 'wife.

I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.

But seventeen is an inconvenient time to fall in love.

If you stay, I'll do whatever you want. I'll quit the band, go with you to New York. But if you need me to go away, I'll do that, too. I was talking to Liz and she said maybe coming back to your old life would be too painful, that maybe it'd be easier for you to erase us. And that would suck, but I'd do it. I can lose you like that if I don't lose you today. I'll let you go. If you stay.