Stargirl Leo Borlock Quotes

The family section [of the newspaper] ran a regular feature about kids on their birthdays, and my mother had called in some info. The last sentence read: "As a hobby, Leo Borlock collects porcupine neckties" (Prologue.4).

When someone turned and nodded, I felt grateful. If someone spoke to me, especially if I had not spoken first, I wanted to cry. I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence (23.3).

Her back was to us, so I couldn't see her face. No one sat with her, but at the tables next to hers kids were cramming two to a seat. She didn't seem to notice. She seemed marooned in a sea of staring, buzzing faces (1.25).

Ironically, as we discovered and distinguished ourselves, a new collective came into being—a vitality, a presence, a spirit that had not been there before (9.6).

Unlike Stargirl, I was aware of the constant anger of our schoolmates, seething like snakes under a porch. In fact, I was not only aware of it, but at time I also understood their point of view […] I saw. I heard. I understood. I suffered. But whose sake was I suffering for? I kept thinking of Señor Saguaro's question: Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others'?

I became angry. I resented having to choose. I refused to choose. I imagined my life without her and without them, and I didn't like it either way (23.8-10).

"I'm invisible," I said to Kevin at lunch. "Nobody hears me. Nobody sees me. I'm the friggin' invisible man."

[…]

"What did I do?" My voice was louder than I intended.

He chewed. He stared. At last he said, "You know what you did."

I had linked myself to an unpopular person.

That was my crime (24.24-32).

"Stargirl, you just can't do things the way you do. If you weren't stuck in a homeschool all your life, you'd understand. You can't just wake up in the morning and say you don't care what the rest of the world think."

Her eyes were wide, her voice peepy like a little girl's.

"You can't?"

"Not unless you want to be a hermit" (25.40-42).

"The point is in a group everybody acts pretty much the same, that's kind of how the group holds itself together."

"Everybody?" she said.

"Well, mostly, I said. That's what jails and mental hospitals are for, to keep it that way."

"You think I should be in jail?" she said.

"I think you should try to be more like the rest of us" (25.47).

And each night I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I like the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.

It was during one of these nightmoon times that it came to me that Hillari Kimble was wrong. Stargirl was real (2.41-42).

"I lay under my sheet of moonlight. Her voice came through the night, from the light, from the stars" (15.10)

And I did have fun. Whether it came from the game or simply from being with her, I don't know. I do know I was surprised at how close I felt to Clarissa and Betty and Adam after watching them for only fifteen minutes (21.52).

In bed that night, I became more and more uncomfortable as the moonlight crept up my sheet. I did something I had never done before. I pulled down the shade (30.25).

In the beginning I still could not see. She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as "nothing." I walked in a gray would of nothings (20.13).

Or she would kneel down and pull me down with her and show me the ants, two of them, lugging the lopped leg of a beetle twenty times their size across the sidewalk, as might two men, were they strong as ants, carry a full-grown tree from one end of town to the other (20.16).

But finally, after much pestering from me, she did tell me how she knew what was going on in people's lives. It was simple, she said. She read the daily paper. Not the headlines or the front page or the sports page or the comics or the TV listings or the Hollywood gossip. What she read were the parts that most people ignored, the parts without headlines and pictures, the boondocks of the paper: the hospital admissions, the death notices, the birthday and wedding announcements, the police blotter, the coming events calendar.
Most of all, she read the fillers… little items that are not considered important enough to be a story or to have a headline. "They're never more than one column wide, never more than an inch or two deep" (21.2).

I observed her as if she were a bird in an aviary. One day I turned a corner and there she was, coming right at me, the long skirt softly rustling, looking straight at me, surrounding me with those eyes. I turned and trotted off the other way. Seating myself in my next class, I felt warm, shaken. I wondered if my foolishness showed. Was I myself becoming goofy? The feeling I had had when I saw her around the corner had been something like panic (3.39).

She stood at my shoulder and looked down at me, smiling and singing, and I didn't know whether to look down at my hands or up at her face, so I did some of each. My face was burning… "Why him?"

Stargirl tilted her head, as if studying me. She grinned mischievously. She tugged on my earlobe and said, "He's cute." And walked off.

I was feeling nine ways at once, and they all ended up at the touch of her hand on my ear—(6.17-19).

Just two weeks before, I had found out she knew my name, and now I was loopy with love. I was floating. I floated up the white light that washed my sheets and slept on the moon. In school I was a yellow balloon, smiling and lazy, floating above the classrooms. I felt a faint tug on my string. Far below, Kevin was calling, "You're in love, dude!" I merely smiled and rolled over and drifted dreamily out a window (17.1).

Look at you. It's Saturday. I've been with you all day, and you've spent the whole day doing stuff for other people. Or taking pictures of other people" (22.69).

She looked like a hundred other girls at Mica High. Stargirl had vanished into a sea of them, and I was thrilled… I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life (26.7).