About a Boy quotes

"Finally he spotted a piece of file paper pinned to a classroom door with the word SPAT! scrawled on it in felt-tip pen. The exclamation point put him off. It was trying too hard" (37)

"This wasn't right. He was only a kid. He'd been thinking that more and more recently, as he got older and older. He didn't know why. Maybe it was because, when he really was only a id, he wasn't capable of recognizing it--you had to be a certain age before you realized that you were actually quite young. Or maybe when he was little there was nothing to worry about--five or six years ago his mum never spent half the day shivering under a coat watching stupid cartoons, and even if she had he might not have thought it was anything out of the ordinary" (44).

"The thing was, he could still remember feeling genuinely hopeful, right up until the last minute: Maybe there will be something there, he had thought, maybe I won't lose face" (51).

Hope = Suspending disbelief

"When Will had conceived this fantasy and joined SPAT, he had imagined sweet little children, not children who would be able to track him down and come to his house. He had imagined entering their world, but he hadn't foreseen that they might be able to penetrate his. He was one of life's visitors; he didn't want to be visited" (105).

"Periods of blankness, when he seemed to disappear into his own head completely, were followed by periods when he seemed to be trying to compensate for these absences, and would ask question after question" (116).

"He used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much" (158).

"The boy somehow seemed to be asking for absolutely nothing and absolutely everything all at the same time" (159).

"He was good, Will could see that now. Not good as in obedient and uncomplaining; it was more of a mindset kind of good, where you looked at something like a pile of crap presents and recognized that they were given with love and chosen with care, and that was enough" (181).

"At midnight they sought each other out and kissed, a kiss that was somewhere between cheek and lip, the embarrassed ambiguity hopefully significant" (197).

"He'd rather be an idiot again. He'd had his whole life set up so that nobody's problem was his problem, and now everybody's problem was his problem, and he had no solutions for any of them. So how, precisely, was he, or anybody else he was involved with, better off?" (268)

"There was enough real trouble in the world without having to invent things" (277).

"Whether you felt something, or whether you felt nothing, it didn't matter: your responses were off either way" (284).

"'It doesn't matter how far you fall if it makes you think, does it?'" (298)