Jerry Spinelli

Tell me I didn't imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in seperate states, our star selves shared an enchanted place. Tell me that right around noon today (eastern time) you had the strangest sensation: a tiny chill on your shoulder...a flutter in the heart...a shadow of strawberry-banana crossing your tongue...tell me you whispered my name.

The Clock on the Morning Lenape BuildingMust Clocks be circles?Time is not a circle.Suppose the Mother of All Minutes startedright here, on the sidewalkin front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the paradeof minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--headed out that way, down Bridge Street.Where would Now be? This minute?Out past the moon?Jupiter?The nearest star?Who came up with minutes, anyway?Who needs them?Name one good thing a minute's ever done.They shorten fun and measure misery.Get rid of them, I say.Down with minutes!And while you're at it--take hourswith you too. Don't get me startedon them.Clocks--that's the problem.Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.Clocks strap us into their shape.Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we dois corkscrew.Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel riders of us all, lug us round and roundfrom number to number,dice the time of our lives into tiny bitsuntil the bits are all we knowand the only question we care to ask is"What time is it?"As if minutes could tell.As if Arnold could look up at this clock onthe Lenape Building and read:15 Minutes till Found.As if Charlie's time is not forever stuckon Half Past Grace.As if a swarm of stinging minutes waits for Betty Lou to step outside.As if love does not tell all the time the Huffelmeyersneed to know.

Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don__ rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you__e doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry?You__e cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you__e stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It__ now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you , but now you__l never know.

Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement.

Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.

Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow.

But she loves her daughter, David can tell, loves her the way David's mother loved him, and sometimes David feels that same love he used to, except now it's coming from other places, other people, and it's a good thing the love is coming because he's beginning to think there aren't enough rules in the universe to bring his mother back.

At the same time, we held back. Because she was different. Different. We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against.

If Heaven and angels exist in a timeless medium we call Forever ("Hey, nobody here but us angels!") ...Then ... ues what? ...There will be no end of me!

You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people.

His smile was so wide he__ have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway

When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.

I'm looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before.

He still heard his mother's voice--"Davey"--rise like whisper-dust from unseen corners in the house, but it was no longer the only voice he heard. His ears were also filled with the voices of others--his father and Primrose and Refrigerator John and his grandmother. Of course, all of their words for a thousand years could not fill the hole left by his mother, but they could raise a loving fence around it so he didn't keep falling in.

It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans.

Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories.