"She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school. In her answers in class, she often spoke of sea horses and stars, but she did not know what a football was. She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew."
===
"She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day."
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"I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence."
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"I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag -- it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off."
===
"This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians."
===
"Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn's eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever. I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them."
===
She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh.
My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid
introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I
threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life.
She saw things. I had not known there was so much to see.
She was forever tugging my arm and saying, "Look!"
I would look around, seeing nothing. "Where?"
She would point. "There."
In the beginning I still could not see. She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing" I walked in a gray world of nothing."
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"The echo of her laughter is the second sunrise I awaken to each day, and at night I feel it is more than the stars looking down on me."
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"And the trouble with bad times is, you can't sleep through them."
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"Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore."
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"You occupied my space. But because you were not in my present, when I looked into my future I saw . . . nothing. Isn't that sad? And stupid?"
===
"I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins."
===
"She dreams a lot. She dreams of Ondines and falling maidens and houses burning in the night. But search her dreams all you like and you'll never find Prince Charming. No knight on a white horse gallops into her dreams to carry her away. When she dreams of love, she dreams of smashed potatoes. "
===
"I'll still be missing you as much as ever. I'l still smile at the memory of you. I'll still be - Okay, I'll say it again - loving you, but I won't abandon myself for you. I cannot be faithful to you without being faithful to myself."
====
"To have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and her self respect - well, that's a trophy enough for a guy's ego, huh?"
====
"Many girls have been romanced under the moon, and I don't mean to say moonlight is overrated, but few I think have known the magic of a sunrise kiss."
===
"My happy wagon is almost empty, Leo. Only five pebbles left. Happywise, I'm operating on only 25 percent capacity. Remember when I first showed my wagon to you? How many pebbles were in it then? Seventeen? And then I put another in, remember? I never told you this, but before I went to bed that night, after we kissed for the first time on the sidewalk outside my house, I put in the last two pebbles. Twenty. Total happiness. For the first time ever. It stayed that way until I painted that big sign on a sheet and hung it outside the school for all the world to see..."
===
"Do not follow me! Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tommorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!"
===
"Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me. "
===
"You liked me."
I smiled.
"You were smitten with me. You were speechless to behold my beauty. You had never met anyone so fascinating. You thought of me every waking minute. You dreamed about me. You couldn't stand it. You couldn't let such wonderfulness out of your sight. You had to follow me."
I turned to Cinnamon. He licked my nose. "Don't give yourself so much credit. It was your rat I was after."
She laughed, and the desert sang."
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
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"We long to be found, hoping our searchers have not given up and gone home."
― Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
===
"I began to feel again something that I had been only dimly aware of before. It was a small, surprising sense of disappointment even as he was kissing me, but the violins were so loud at the time I could hear nothing else. Now the disappointment was returning and with it the realization that the magic had come only from the moment, not from him. It was different with you. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same. The setting never mattered. On the sidewalk in front of my house, at the enchanted place in the desert, walking the halls at school- where I was with you, I heard violins."
― Jerry Spinelli, Love Stargirl
===
