Release by Patrick Ness

"Everyone is everyone. Whole point of 'everyone.'"

"The whole point of everyone is for them to constantly do stupid things while we--not everyone-- make fun of them for it and feel superior. p6
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"They don't believe in it [therapy]. If you can't pray it away, it's not a real problem." p7
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Ness said, at the ALAN Convention 2017 in St. Louis, MO that he wrote Release as the book he wished he had when he was a kid. I think this quote from the book also speaks to that.

But sometimes a guide or history or a long-established literature would have been useful. Could he buy a rose? And give it? How would Linus take it? Did everyone else in the world know the answer except him? p11
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"No," his father said to his other too quickly, too firmly. "And don't talk like that. Of course he isn't." With his eye on Adam, making clear this was only partly belief and mostly command and 100 percent denial of any dance classes. p25

But sometimes it felt like change only happened in far-off cities and was having too much fun there to make it out to the suburbs, where the benefit of his parents' education was merely that they smiled and kept mostly quiet about their certainties rather than discarding them.  p26

He had loved Enzo. Loved him. And who cared if it was the love of a fifteen- and then sixteen-year-old. Why did that make it any less? They were older than those two idiots in Romeo and Juliet. Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he'd grow out of it? That didn't make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening. The truth was always now, even if you were young. Especially if you were young. p29

"My point: why do you have to call yourself anything? Because, if you don't, freedom. Because, self-actualization. Because, fluidity and not calcifying into what that label will make you." p35

"When I realized how things were, when I said to myself that I am not this thing I've been told I have to be, that I am this other thing instead, then Jesus, Ange, the label didn't feel like a prison, it felt like a whole new freaking map, one that was my own, and now I can take any journey I want to take and it's possible I might even find a home there. It's not a reduction. It's a key." p35-36

"My parents believed," she continued, "that baby talk and avoiding topics was almost child abuse. That you'd end up raising swaddled little morons to send out into the world to be eaten alive. I preferred it when adults expected me to reach up to them rather than always leaning down to me. Do you see what I mean?" p65

"Little girls aren't naturally lost," Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. "Someone makes them that way." p68

"People with really stiff morals are easier to tip over," Renee said. "That's what my mom always said." p88

"Never pass up the chance to be kissing someone. It's the worst kind of regret." p134

"Look, there's nothing more wrong with you than there is with anyone else." p141

Linus was cute, and that was a fact. He was a nerd, like Renee and Karen said, but nerdiness-- like a big nose, like a belly-- was never any barrier to cuteness. p145

Linus never even had to come out. As a sophomore, he took a boy-- from another school, but a boy nonetheless-- to the Junior Prom (having charmed his way into a ticket) and the only person at Frome High who even batted an eyelid was FHS's very Christian front office secretary, who wrote a note to Linus' parents, who in turn wrote a note back explaining in great detail how she and the school district would be sued if she ever tried to discriminate against their son again. p147

"I would sit outside that dance in sackcloth and cover myself in manure if that were my child." He really said that. Which probably shouldn't have made Adam think that, in order to sit outside in protest, his father would have had to let him go to the dance with a boy in the first place. p147

"Because those things never go away. We're going to have a president one day and she's going to be called Hayden and she's going to have a sun tattooed on the back of her neck and she would be the best president we've ever had ever except on day four of her term, someone finds those pictures she took after a peace rally with that nice beardy activist who said he didn't believe in mementos but that taking pictures 'got him in the mood' and he'd totally erase them later because he respected her too much." p158

"Here's this thing, the love, that should be proof of God, and they're telling you it's the opposite." p188

"They're your parents. They're meant to love you because. Never in spite." p219

Description

Angela Darlington. The girl born in Seoul with an adoptive mother from the Netherlands and a father with a completely English name. Who all lived on a farm in Frome, Washington, an actual farm, with actual animals, actual sheep that got sold to slaughter-- a topic Angela kept quiet about as it wouldn't have gone down well with the vegetarians at school. They were, in short, about as American as you can be.

But not, of course, the kind of Americans certain other kinds of Americans thought were American. p109
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"You know what I mean, Lydia. His eyes are so smart. Like there's all these little calculations going on in there that you'll never know about."
...

"I'm not saying it's a bad thing necessarily. Maybe that's God's gift to him. The noticing. The wisdom beyond his years." p195

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