“They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can’t kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.”
― Walter Dean Myers, Monster
“The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.”
― Walter Dean Myers, Monster
“Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.”
― Walter Dean Myers, Monster
“If anyone could look into my head
See or feel the dread that has captured
Me or see within this sad, unhappy brain
They would only turn away
Turn away.”
― Walter Dean Myers, Street Love
“The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.”
― Walter Dean Myers, Monster
“People told me to give up trying to be special and settle down to a regular life. There ain't nothing wrong with a regular life, and that's the Lord's truth...But it wasn't for me, because I wanted to be something special...I knew how easy it was for a dream to die. I seen that all around me. You could let it die by just looking the other way—you know, some of those Asian people say they don't kill nothing, but they'll take a fish out of water and lay it on the ground and then say it just died on its own—you can do that with a dream, too. And sometimes you can get so frustrated, you feel so bad about your dream, that you go on and kill it yourself. When you do that, you're killing a piece of yourself, too."
—Mr. Cephus”
― Walter Dean Myers, Game
“We all think we're different, but when it comes around, we end up needing the same things. Somebody to love us. Somebody to respect us.”
― Walter Dean Myers, Carmen
“Think about all the tomorrows of your life.”
― Walter Dean Myers, Monster
“We’re suggesting that [kids are] missing something if they don’t read but, actually, we’re condemning kids to a lesser life. If you had a sick patient, you would not try to entice them to take their medicine. You would tell them, ‘Take this or you’re going to die.’ We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.”
― Walter Dean Myers
