K.A. Applegate > Quotes

“I wanted so much to live. I wanted so much to stay and not to leave. In a moment no answer would matter to me, but just the same, I wanted to know what I guess any dying person wants to know.
"Answer this, Ellimist: Did I . . . did I make a difference? My life, and my . . . my death . . . was I worth it? Did my life really matter?"
"Yes," he said. "You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You mattered."
"Yeah. Okay, then. Okay, then.”
― K. A. Applegate

“I felt my throat tighten and constrict. My hearts ached with a pain I could not describe. I wondered if I were dying. I felt not sadness. I felt pity. For myself. For us all. We were children no longer. And we never would be again.”
― K. A. Applegate

“Love is pretty important. It's like wearing a suit of armor. It makes you strong.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Visitor

“The monsters in our valley were destroyed that day. Only a very few survived. But that was all right, because we didn't need monsters anymore. We had become them.”
― K.A. Applegate

“I wanted to throw up. But I would have had to get out of bed to run to the bathroom. And I felt like I never wanted to leave that bed again. I love animals. I've been raised all my life around them. I love nature. But what did I really know about it? I have been more animals than many people ever see in a lifetime. I have flown with the wings of an osprey. I've raced through the ocean in the body of a dolphin. I've seen the world through the eyes of an owl at night, and smelled the wind with all the keen senses of a wolf. I've flown upside down and backward in the body of a fly. Sometimes I go out into the far fields at night and become a horse and run through the grass. And everything I've been, every animal, is either killer or killed. In a million, million battles all around the world, on every continent, in every square inch of space, there was killing. From the great cats in Africa that cold-bloodedly search out the young and weak gazelles, to the terrible wars that are fought out in anthills and termite colonies. All of nature was at war. And, at the top of all that destruction, humans killed each other as well as other species, and now those same people have been enslaved and destroyed by the Yeerks. Nature at its finest. Cute, cuddly animals who slaughtered to live. The color of nature wasn't green. It was red. Blood-red.”
― K.A Applegate, The Secret

“It was a symbiotic relationship. Or codependent, whatever.
They needed me to be the bad guy.
And I needed them to be the good guys.
See, if they were the good guys, and I was on their team, then that automatically made me a good guy, too. Even if I was different.”
― K. A. Applegate

“People who argue about how smart whales are, or whether they are as smart as humans, kind of miss the point. Whales will never read books or build rockets or do algebra. In all those areas, humans are smarter. Humans are the great brains of planet Earth. But it isn’t necessary to believe whales are as smart as humans to believe that they are great. They don’t have to know words to sing songs. They don’t have to be anything but what they are to be magnificent. And even though I don’t really know what a soul is, I know this—if humans have them, then so do whales.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Message

“Humans are always lost in time. They are constantly certain that "X" is later or earlier than they thought. I have never known a human to say, "Oh, look, it's exactly what time I thought it was.”
― K.A. Applegate

“Be happy for me, and all those who fly free.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Encounter

“From the rising of the sun to the setting, to its rising again, we place what is hard to endure with what is sweet to remember, and find peace.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Illusion

“Elfangor laughed in my mind. "Victory without sacrifice? You know better than that."
"You don't have to give up your principles to win. Isn't there always an alternative to sacrifice if you just keep your mind clear, and step back, and see it, and..."
"You know better than that.”
― K. A. Applegate

“Then he drank the coffee.

"Ahhh! Ohh! Oh, oh, oh, what? What? What is that?!"

"What?" I asked, alarmed. I swiveled my head back and forth, looking for some danger.

"A new sense. It... I cannot explain it. It is... it comes rom this mouth." He pointed at his mouth. "It happened when I drank thsi liquid. It was pleasant. Very pleasant."

-Animorphs #5, The Predator page 19”
― K.A. Applegate

“I was going to have to hunt him down.

I was going to hunt him down and destroy him.

No, not destroy. That was a weasel word. It was vague, meaningless. I was going to kill him.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Solution

“There's nothing like a trip to the Yeerk pool to make you appreciate life and freedom.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Sickness

“girls”
― K.A. Applegate, The Visitor

“Power enough to win? No. Power enough to fight? Ah, yes. Just enough, little Jake, here is just enough power to imprison you in a cage of duty, to make you fight.”
― K.A. Applegate, Back to Before

“Jake assumed that he would be the one to die. Marco had seen this instantly. He wasn't arguing in favor of the awful future we'd seen. He was arguing for the life of his best friend.”
― K. A. Applegate

“It bothers you, doesn’t it? It bothers you when your victims don’t hate you.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Departure

“Don't look," Rachel said to her. She put her arm around Cassie's shoulder and held her close. Then she reached for Tobias and took his hand. I guess you never really know someone till you see them scared. And even scared to death, with tears running down her face, Rachel had strength to spare.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Invasion

“If you've never been really afraid, let me tell you - it does things to you. It takes over your mind and your body. You want to scream. You want to run. You want to wet your pants. You want to throw yourself down on the ground and cry and beg please, please, please, please don't kill me!”
― K.A. Applegate, The Invasion

“Compared to a cat, the best gymnast who ever lived is like a big staggering cow or something.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Visitor

“It's funny, you know. We're free. We make choices. We weigh things in our minds, consider everything carefully, use all the tools of logic and education. And in the end, what we mostly do is what we have no choice but to do.
Makes you think, why bother? But you bother because you do, that's why. Because you're a DNA-brand computer running Childhood 1.0 software. They update the software but the changes are always just around the edges.
You have the brain you have, the intelligence, the talents, the strengths and weaknesses you have, from the moment they take you out of the box and throw away the Styrofoam padding.
But you have the fears you picked up along the way. The terrors of age four or six or eight are never suspended, just layered over. The dread I'd felt so recently, a dread that should be so much greater because the facts had been so much more horrible, still could not diminish the impact of memories that had been laid down long years before.
It's that way all through life, I guess. I have a relative who says she still gets depressed every September because in the back of her mind it's time for school to start again. She's my great-aunt. The woman is sixty-seven and still bumming over the first day of school five-plus decades ago.
It's sad in a way because the pleasures of life get old and dated fast. The teenage me doesn't get the jolt the six-year-old me got from a package of Pop Rocks. The me I've become doesn't rush at the memories of the day I skated down a parking ramp however many years ago.
Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh.
Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete.
I don't know. I don't know much. I feel like I know less all the time. Rate I'm going, by the time I'm twenty-one I won't know a damned thing.
But still I was me. Had no choice, I guess. I don't know, maybe that's bull and I was just feeling sorry for myself. But, bottom line, I dried my eyes, and I pushed my dirty, greasy hair back off my face, and I started off down the road again because whatever I was, whoever I was, however messed up I might be, I wasn't leaving April behind.
Maybe it was all an act programmed into me from the get-go, or maybe it grew up out of some deep-buried fear, I mean maybe at some level I was really just as pathetic as Senna thought I was. Maybe I was a fake. Whatever. Didn't matter.
I was going back to the damned dragon, and then I was getting April out, and everything and everyone else could go screw themselves.
One good thing: For now at least, I was done being scared.”
― K.A. Applegate

“I saw Jake in the hallway at school. I pretended not to notice him.

I saw Rachel, too. She had a dark look in her eyes. Like she hadn't slept. Like something was really wrong.

Even Cassie seemed grim. It had gotten to all of us. It's not so easy to just forget terror. It's not easy to just ignore the memory of your leg being ripped off. Of being dismembered. Torn apart.

One of these days, I thought, one of us is going to go crazy. Totally lock-me-up-in-a-rubber-room nutso. It was too much. This wasn't how life was supposed to be.

One of us would snap. One of us would lost it. It could happen, even to strong people.

-Animorphs #5, The Predator page 52”
― K.A. Applegate

“... how often is it possible to see the big picture, really?" Rachel said. "Things happen fast. You just have to make the best decision you can and then go for it.... With me, it's about instinct. I knew we had to dig that tunnel. Turns out, I was right, but for the wrong reasons.”
― K. A. Applegate

“ Tobias said.

I nodded and wiped away my tears. "Yeah," I said. "Until then, we fight.”
― K. A. Applegate

“Andalites, humans, there’s no difference. You’re both smug, moralizing, ”superior” races. You both live in beautiful worlds. You have hands and eyes, and the freedom to move about wherever you like. And you hate us for wanting all those same things.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Departure

“Well, I'm guessing hat in about two centuries or so, humans will discover zero space and make transponders. Whatever they are. But in the meantime, I'm going to have a sandwich."

-Animorphs #5, The Predator page 34”
― K.A. Applegate

“The Yeerks must not be allowed to think that they can use hostages against us."

"Aren't you kind of missing the point?" Cassie said quietly. "I thought the point was to save Bek."

"No," Toby said. "The point is to defeat the Yeerks. We must be strong. Once we free a Hork-Bajir, he must never be taken again."

"Do you think the Yeerks will respect you? They won't. They'll come after you harder," Cassie pointed out.

Toby nodded. "That is true. But the Hork-Bajir will respect themselves. A fool is strong so that others will see. A wise person is strong for himself. The Hork-Bajir will be strong for the Hork-Bajir. That way, when the Yeerks are all gone, we will still be strong.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Pretender

“My first reaction was that someone had fused a person and a deer together. The creature had a head and shoulders and arms that were more or less where they should have been, though the skin was a pale shade of blue. But below that he had fur, a mix of blue and tan, covering a four-legged body that really did look like it belonged to a deer, or maybe a small horse. He ducked his head out the doorway and I could see that even the fairly normal-looking parts of him weren’t all that normal. For a start, he had no mouth, just three vertical slits. And then there were his eyes. Two of them were where they should have been, although they were a glittery green color that was kind of shocking. But the real shock was the other eyes. He had what seemed like horns, only on the top of each horn was an eye. The horns could move, twisting to point the eyes front and back or up and down. I thought the eyes were bad, until I saw the tail. It was like a scorpion’s tail, thick and powerful-looking. On the end was a wickedly curved, very sharp-looking horn or stinger.”
― K.A. Applegate, The Invasion

“Who has stopped worshiping us?"
"Everyone in the old world," April said little harshly.
"But of course they have, young woman. We left, didn't we? We came to Everworld. How can you expect people to worship a God they can't see from time to time?"
"Yeah April," Jalil prodded, failing to suppress a smirk. "How can you?”
― K. A. Applegate