Holes Stanley Quotes

You can't let anybody else tell you what your choices are. Sometimes they won't give you the right choice.

But don't forget who you really are. And I'm not talking about your so-called real name. All names are made up by someone else, even the one your parents gave you.   You know who you really are. When you're alone at night, looking up at the stars, or maybe lying in your bed in total darkness, you know that nameless person inside you.   Your life is about to be ripped apart. You will be turned into a digging machine. Your muscles will toughen. So will your heart and soul. That's necessary for survival. But don't lose touch with that person deep inside you, or else you won't really have survived at all.

The best doctors are the ones that can get inside your head and fix something without making a hole.

Stanley wondered if this was how a condemned man felt on his way to the electric chair—appreciating all of the good things in life for the last time.

Stanley was still digging.

What scared Stanley the most about dying wasn't his actual death. He figured he could handle the pain. It wouldn't be much worse than what he felt now. In fact, maybe at the moment of his death he would be too weak to feel pain. Death would be a relief. What worried him the most was the thought of his parents not knowing what happened to him, not knowing whether he was dead or alive. He hated to imagine what it would be like for his mother and father, day after day, month after month, not knowing, living on false hope. For him, at least, it would be over. For his parents, the pain would never end.

The needles they poke you with leaves a hole that closes in. But unkind words can make a hole that will never mend.

Stanley spent more time pushing the wheelbarrow than digging, because he was such a slow digger. He carted away the excess dirt and dumped it into previously dug holes. He was careful not to dump any of it in the hole where the gold tube was actually found.

good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.

If Stanley and his father weren't always hopeful, then it wouldn't hurt so much every time their hopes were crushed

All too soon Stanley was back out on the lake, sticking his shovel into the dirt. X-Ray was right: the third hole was the hardest.

Stanley took a shower—if you could call it that, ate dinner—if you could call it that, and went to bed—if you could call his smelly and scratchy cot a bed.

If only, if only,” the woodpecker sighs, “The bark on the tree was as soft as the skies.” While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely, Crying to the moo—oo—oon, “If only, if only.” Stanley

Everyone in his family had always liked the fact that “Stanley Yelnats” was spelled the same frontward and backward. So they kept naming their sons Stanley. Stanley was an only child, as was every other Stanley Yelnats before him.

left his great-grandfather to face the hot barren desert. The Warden had left Stanley to face Mr. Sir. Somehow his great-grandfather

The reader is probably asking: Why would anyone go to Camp Green Lake? Most campers weren't given a choice. Camp Green Lake is a camp for bad boys. If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy. That was what some people thought. Stanley Yelnats was given a choice. The judge said, "You may go to jail, or you may go to Camp Green Lake." Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before

Mr. Sir stared at her. He had three long red marks slanting across the left side of his face. Stanley didn’t know if the redness was caused by her nail polish or his blood. It took a moment for the venom to sink in. Suddenly, Mr. Sir screamed and clutched his face with both hands. He let himself fall over, rolling off the hearth and onto the rug.

He brought his tray to the table. Behind him, a boy from one of the other tents said, “Hey, what happened to your face?” There was a crash. Stanley turned to see Mr. Sir holding the boy’s head against the oatmeal pot. “Is something wrong with my face?” The boy tried to speak but couldn’t. Mr. Sir had him by the throat. “Does anyone see anything wrong with my face?” asked Mr. Sir, as he continued to choke the boy. Nobody said anything. Mr. Sir let the boy go. His head banged against the table as he fell to the ground. Mr. Sir stood over him and asked, “How does my face look to you now?” A gurgling sound came out of the boy’s mouth, then he managed to gasp the word, “Fine.” “I’m kind of handsome, don’t you think?” “Yes, Mr. Sir.” Out

How many onions do you think we’ve eaten?” he asked. Zero shrugged. “I don’t even know how long we’ve been here.” “I’d say about a week,” said Stanley. “And we probably each eat about twenty onions a day, so that’s…” “Two hundred and eighty onions,” said Zero. Stanley smiled. “I bet we really stink.

LOUIS SACHAR is the author of the New York Times #1 bestseller Holes, winner of the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Christopher Award. He is also the author of Stanley Yelnats’ Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake; Small Steps, winner of the Schneider Family Book Award; and The Cardturner, a Publishers Weekly Best Book, a Parents’ Choice Gold Award recipient, and an ALA-YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults book. His books for younger readers include There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, The Boy Who Lost His Face, Dogs Don’t Tell Jokes, and the Marvin Redpost series, among many others.

So sure, a leftward flurry of legislation got LBJed through Congress in 2143, but there was no guarantee of permanence to anything they did, and the pushback was ferocious as always, because people are crazy and history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.

letter. Stanley

He didn’t have any friends at home. He was overweight and the kids at his middle school often teased him about his size. Even his teachers sometimes made cruel comments without realizing it. On his last day of school, his math teacher, Mrs. Bell, taught ratios. As an example, she chose the heaviest kid in the class and the lightest kid in the class, and had them weigh themselves. Stanley weighed three times as much as the other boy. Mrs. Bell wrote the ratio on the board, 3:1, unaware of how much embarrassment she had caused both of them. Stanley

Stanley was not a bad kid. He was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. He'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was all because of his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather! He smiled. It was a family joke. Whenever anything went wrong, they always blamed Stanley's no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather.

You thirsty?" Zero asked. "No," said Stanley. "Because you have three full jars of water," said Zero. "I thought maybe it was getting too heavy for you. If you drink some, it will lighten your load." "I'm not thirsty," said Stanley. "But if you want a drink, I'll give you some." "I'm not thirsty," said Zero. "I was just worried about you." Stanley smiled. "I'm a camel," he said. [...] When they did finally take a drink, they agreed to do it at the same time. [...] "You know I'm not thirsty," Stanley said, as he unscrewed the lid. "I'm just drinking so you will." "I'm just drinking so you will," said Zero. They clinked the jars together and, each watching the other, poured the water into their stubborn mouths.

He is the same soul. You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can't. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. 'God loves you' is the only possible sentence! So it's love you must follow to the heart of your father-in-law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave.

Dear Stanley, It was wonderful to hear from you Your letter made me feel like one of the other moms who can afford to send their kids to summer camp. I know it’s not the same, but I am very proud of you for trying to make the best of a bad situation. Who knows? Maybe something good will come of this. Your father thinks he is real close to a breakthrough on his sneaker project. I hope so. The landlord is threatening to evict us because of the odor. I feel sorry for the little old lady who lived in a shoe. It must have smelled awful!

holes BY LOUIS SACHAR “Nearly everything in the room was broken; the TV, the pinball machine, the furniture. Even the people looked broken, with their worn out bodies sprawled over the various chairs and sofas.” (p.43) This is Stanley’s view of the “wreck room” at Camp Green Lake. It is the one place the boys are allowed to relax somewhat and they have trashed it. The inhumanity of the camp has possessed the boys. Stanley sees this room as a reminder that the boys have the capacity for violence, and he does not want to mess with the other campers.

Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first…and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure buildup, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like—what?—an ecology—a fellfield—or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well—a bit grandiose, that—really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better—weather—storm fronts of thought, high-pressure zones, low-pressure cells, hurricanes—the jet streams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds…life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

Redrum by Stewart Stafford A Winter's tale of horrors profound, The haunted hotel's dark tapestry, Supreme isolation's moonscape snowbound, A father gripped by homicidal history. He sought to write, heal, absolve sins, Overlooked the hotel’s Redrum plans, Vomiting up daymares of phantom twins, His mind possessed by unseen hands. Room Two Three Seven, malevolent, Forbidden to enter its dark hole, Where ageless ladies bathed decadent, Luring caretakers to an adulterer's role. His wife and son sensed the danger, A bloody elevator with nowhere to run, A father's warpath with axe and anger, He became the monster, the devil's son. It might horrify 42 ways from Sunday, Only his shining son grasped the fact, May as well be across the galaxy, As in a labyrinth with that maniac. He failed to kill, he froze, met his fate, The hotel consumed his spirit as its own, Purgatorial torture in damnation's bait, He smiled in the photo, eternally alone. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Why should I discuss it with you?” she said, turning her gaze on Sax. “It’s clear what you all think about this, we’ve gone over it many times before, and nothing I’ve said makes any difference to you. Here you sit in your little holes running your little experiments, making things like kids with a chemistry set in a basement, while the whole time an entire world sits outside your door. A world where the landforms are a hundred times larger than their equivalents on Earth, and a thousand times older, with evidence concerning the beginning of the solar system scattered all over, as well as the whole history of a planet, scarcely changed in the last billion years. And you’re going to wreck it all. And without ever honestly admitting what you’re doing, either. Because we could live here and study the planet without changing it— we could do that with very little harm or even inconvenience to ourselves. All this talk of radiation is bullshit and you know it. There’s simply not a high enough level of it to justify this mass alteration of the environment. You want to do that because you think you can. You want to try it out and see— as if this were some big playground sandbox for you to build castles in. A big Mars jar! You find your justifications where you can, but it’s bad faith, and it’s not science.

You will earn the respect of the others by doing your job without grumbling. No it’s-not-fair’s. No I-don’t-belong-here’s. But don’t go overboard the other way, either. You don’t want to wake up every morning singing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.

history never ends, and good is accomplished against the immense black-hole gravity of greed and fear.

That’s the Little Dipper. Hey, Armpit, what sign are you?” “This is my sign,” Armpit said, and gave him the finger.

Fränkel-Conrat seems to have done the biggest thing with TMV, since Stanley crystallized it. He can add soluble TMV protein to soluble TMV RNA, aggregate the whole mess into rods of which 0.1% are infective!!! Naturally, you don’t believe it—neither did I nor anyone else, but unless he has made up the whole thing it now seems that it must be true. You can’t beat that for laughs, can you Buddy? Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat had taken particles of tobacco-mosaic virus apart, which had been done before—and then had successfully put them back together again. The virus is made of one long single strand of RNA and a large number of identical protein subunits—2,130 of these, it is now known, each a single polypeptide chain folded into a shape like the first joint of a thumb. As Watson had glimpsed in the summer of 1952, these subunits join up, side to side but slightly askew, to form a helix with all the thumbs pointing out. The overall shape is a rod with a hole down the middle like a short piece of macaroni. The subunits are held together by weak bonds between certain charged amino-acid side chains. The central hole is twenty angstroms across, and is empty. But the protein units, assembled, have a long continuous internal groove winding up beyond the wall of the central hole. In this groove lies the strand of RNA—which explains the discovery, which had intrigued Watson and everyone else, that all its phosphate groups lie at a common radius. By treatment with mild acid, Fraenkel-Conrat neutralized the charges that hold the protein subunits together, and the rod fell apart and stopped being infectious. He then separated and purified the protein. In a separate, parallel step, he treated virus particles with detergent to strip away the protein to allow the RNA to be recovered. Then he mixed the subunits and the RNA strands in solution once more—and got out normal infectious particles. With the electron microscope, Robley Williams confirmed that whole virus particles were there. The virus assembled itself: the architecture of the complete particle seemed to be an inbuilt consequence of the structure of the protein subunits.

Stanley only half listened to the talk of the counselors. He didn’t know who “that woman” was or what “A.G.” meant. He didn’t even realize they were initials. It sounded like one word, “Age-ee.” His mind was focused on the tiny claws that moved up and down his skin and through his hair.

The Rat Office was at the top of the East Gate Lookout Tower. Stanley took the quick route, running along the top of the Castle wall, over The Hole in the Wall Tavern, which even Stanley did not know existed. The rat quickly reached the Lookout Tower and scurried into a large drainpipe that ran up the side. Soon he emerged at the top, jumped onto the parapet and knocked on the door of a small hut bearing the

Then he turned to Zero, who had been quietly digging in his hole since Stanley's return. Zero's hole was smaller than all the others.

A kind of bolt-hole, you mean. To escape to if there’s trouble.” “Exactly. I think there are people in these transnationals who want Mars terraformed just as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.

him. That in itself was deeply worrying. It was Jeff, one of our mountaineers, who followed a snowmobile track to an unobtrusive hole. He then came back and got Lance, the team’s other mountaineer, looking

He didn’t have any friends at home. He was overweight and the kids at his middle school often teased him about his size. Even his teachers sometimes made cruel comments without realizing it. On his last day of school, his math teacher, Mrs. Bell, taught ratios. As an example, she chose the heaviest kid in the class and the lightest kid in the class, and had them weigh themselves. Stanley weighed three times as much as the other boy. Mrs. Bell wrote the ratio on the board, 3:1, unaware of how much embarrassment she had caused both of them.

What are we supposed to be looking for?" Stanley asked him. "You're not looking for anything. You're digging to build character. It's just if you find anything, the Warden would like to know about it.

Is your last name your first name backward?" Zero asked. Stanley stared at him in amazement. Had he been working on that all night?

Do you know anything at all about how they hang people?” Perry Mason asked abruptly. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “For murder,” he went on. “It usually happens along in the morning. They come down to the death cell and read the death warrant. Then they strap your hands behind your back, and strap a board along your back, so that you can’t cave in. They start a march down the corridor to the scaffold. There are thirteen steps that you have to climb, and then you walk over and stand on a trap. There are prison officials standing by the side of the trap, who look things over, and, in a little cubby-hole back of the trap, are three convicts with sharp knives. There are three strings that run across a board. The hangman puts a noose over your head, and a black bag, and then puts straps around your legs …

There was a change in the weather. For the worse. The air became unbearably humid. Stanley was drenched in sweat. Beads of moisture ran down the handle of his shovel. It was almost as if the temperature had gotten so hot that the air itself was sweating.

Stanley had no trouble falling asleep,

They walked for what seemed like a very long time, and still never came across the Mary Lou. Stanley was pretty sure they were heading in the right direction. He remembered that when they left the boat, they were headed toward the setting sun. Now they were headed toward the rising sun. He knew the sun didn’t rise and set exactly in the

I wonder who she was," said Zero. "Who?" "Mary Lou," said Zero. Stanley smiled. "I guess she was once a real person on a real lake. It's hard to imagine." "I bet she was pretty," said Zero. "Somebody must have loved her a lot, to name a boat after her." "Yeah," said Stanley. "I bet she looked great in a bathing suit, sitting in the boat while her boyfriend rowed.

Theodore whirled and grabbed Stanley by his collar. “My name’s not Thee-o-dore,” he said. “It’s Armpit.” He threw Stanley to the ground.

Stanley was thankful that there were no racial problems. X-Ray, Armpit, and Zero were black. He, Squid, and Zigzag were white. Magnet was Hispanic. On the lake they were all the same reddish brown color—the color of dirt.

Stanley raised and lowered one shoulder.

It’s easier to get into a hole than get out of it (Arab proverb).

Back at school, a bully named Derrick Dunne used to torment Stanley.

Quite simply, I am drawn to the past more than I am the future... I am physical kinesthetic, tactile. Through touch, I take in information... I want to dig a hole in the earth and find the remains of something that was once something of importance, no matter how minor, to someone many years ago and imagine what their life was like.