WORD LAB ARCHIVE
Fall 2021 / Quarter 1
# / Date
Sentence / Passage
Source
#1
9/9 (A)
9/10 (B)
"This is how it all begins. With Zephyr and Fry -reigning neighborhood sociopaths -- torpedoing after
me and the whole forest floor shaking under my feet
as I blast through air, trees, this white-hot panic."
I’ll Give You the
Sun, by Jandy
Nelson
(fiction)
#2
9/13 (A)
9/14 (B)
“My parents probably wanted a girl who would sit in
the pews wearing pretty florals and a soft smile; they
got combat boots and a mouth silent until it’s sharp
as an island machete.”
The Poet X, by
Elizabeth
Acevedo
(novel in verse)
#3
9/15 (A)
9/17 (B)
“Where I was that day: on the old tweed couch in
Axel’s basement, brushing against his shoulder, trying
to ignore the orange wall of electricity between us.”
The Astonishing
Color of After, by
Emily X.R. Pan
(fiction)
#4
9/20 (A)
9/21 (B)
"New Orleans is a bouquet of pixelated memories -- a
caravan of embers that refuse to turn to ash."
“Here Nor
There,” by Clint
Smith (poetry)
#5
9/22 (A)
9/23 (B)
​"Our house these days is a choked-up throat. I cannot
exhale myself out the front door. This is no castle. It's
an altar to a man. It’s a National Geographic shrine.
The house is a living sadness, and as Mami walks its
halls at night, even the floorboards weep."
Clap When You
Land, by
Elizabeth
Acevedo (novel
in verse)
#6
9/24 (A)
9/27 (B)
"In Mississippi, summer means mosquito. It also means
tomatoes, means mosquito, means peaches, means
humidity, means strawberries, and means mosquito.
Mostly mosquito."
World of
Wonders, by
Aimee
Nezhukumatathil
(nonfiction)
#7
9/28 (A)
9/29 (B)
“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident
(picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a
pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her
subsists within the hollows and dells of memory.”
Lolita, by
Vladimir
Nabokov
(fiction)
“Somewhere between morning and nightfall, somewhere
#8
9/30 (A) between New York City and the tip of Long Island, there
& 10/1 (B) was a nine-year-old girl standing somewhere between the
shoreline and the sand dunes, scanning the horizon like a
hawk, like an Amazon warrior, like a great cavalry captain,
like Charlemagne on the morning before he took on his
final enemy -- jellyfish.”
“Jellyfish,” by
Sarah Kay
(poetry)
#9
10/4 (A)
10/5 (B)
"The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who
are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of
everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or
say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like
fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars."
On the Road, by
Jack Keruac
(nonfiction)
#10
10/8 (A)
10/11 (B)
“To many, I was myth incarnate, the embodiment of a most
superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a
mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an
The Strange &
Beautiful
Sorrows of Ava
angel. To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at
all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost.
But I knew the truth — deep down, I always did: I was just a girl.”
Lavender, by
Leslye Walton
(fiction/fantasy)
#11
10/12 (A)
10/13 (B)
​"I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded:
not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain
gathering its things, packing up, and slipping
away unannounced in the middle of the night."
The Kite
Runner, by
Khaled Hosseini
(fiction)
#12
10/14 (A)
10/18 (B)
“The sharp odor of pine -- wood, bark, cones, and needles -- Pax, by Sarah
slivered through the air like blades, but beneath that, the
Pennypacker
fox recognized softer clover and wild garlic and ferns, and (fiction)
also a hundred things he had never encountered before
but that smelled green and urgent.”
#13
10/19 (A)
10/20 (B)
“It is only now, all these years later, that Rahel
understood. How easy it is to shatter a story. To break
a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream
being carried around carefully like a piece of
porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did,
is the much harder thing to do.”
The God of
Small Things, by
Arundhati Roy
(fiction)
#14
10/21 (A)
10/22 (B)
“I was made for the library, not the classroom. The
classroom was a jail of other people’s interests; the
library was open, unending, free.”
Between the
World & Me, by
Ta-Nehisi Coates
(nonfiction)
#15
11/1 (B)
11/2 (A)
“She longed to sleep, but she had squandered her fatigue
on the boredom of the afternoon. The time scraped. The
time scraped slowly. The time scraped slowly by. And she
had just finally begun to doze again when a familiar sound
groaned out through the house.”
The Way Back,
by Gavriel Savit
(fiction)
#16
11/3 (B)
11/4 (A)
“The robber -- white guy, six feet, maybe, brown jacket,
black T-shirt, red ball cap, pale eyes and brows -- yells,
"GET ON THE FLOOR" -- you know, like bank robbers do.
We hit the floor. It's like everyone in that bank is a puppet
and he's cut all our strings."
The Girls I’ve
Been, by Tess
Sharpe
(YA thriller)
Fall 2021 / Quarter 2
# / Date
Sentence / Passage
Source
#17
11/12 (A)
11/15 (B)
"Three objects sat upon the carpet in Cleo Porter's
living room: an apple core, a human skull, and a
package wrapped in red. Deep red. Blood red.
'Hemoglobin red,' as Cleo would say."
Cleo Porter &
the Body
Electric, by Jake
Burt (fiction)
#18
11/16 (A)
11/17 (B)
"The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It's
Shatter Me, by
always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our
Tahereh Mafi
light and dark moments, changing forever just as we
(YA fiction)
do. Every day a different version of itself. Sometimes
weak and pale, sometimes strong and full of light. The
moon understands what it means to be human.
Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections."
#19
11/18 (A)
“I was a liar; a cheater; a manipulator; a fat,
happysad, bald-headed black boy with a heart
Heavy: An
American
11/19 (B)
murmur; and according to you and the white girl I lied Memoir, by
to every day, I was a good dude.”
Kiese Laymon
(nonfiction)
#20
11/30 (A)
12/1 (B)
“You once told me that the human eye is god's
loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes
through the pupil and still it holds nothing. How the
eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's
another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry,
just as empty.”
On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous,
by Ocean Vuong
(fiction, memoir,
prose poetry)
#21
12/2 (A)
12/3 (B)
"It is, and has been, June 23, 2020 for nine months
now. It's a fluke. An irregularity in space. We just have
to be patient. Our hair grows / babies are born /
people die. But time has stopped. We are being held
for ransom / no one knows what the ransom is / who
to give it to."
Switch,
by A. S. King
(YA fiction,
surrealism)
#22
12/6 (A)
12/7 (B)
“Prague, early May. The sky weighed gray over
fairy-tale rooftops, and all the world was watching.
Satellites had even been tasked to surveil the Charles
Bridge in case the…visitors…returned.”
Days of Blood &
Starlight, by
Laini Taylor
(YA fantasy)
#23
12/8 (A)
12/9 (B)
"My whole life felt like I was a bug crawling inside a
coiled-up garden hose -- smaller and smaller circles,
slick-dark and rubber-smelling, the only hope of
escape something as likely to drown you as save you."
Weedeater, by
Robert Gipe
(illustrated
novel)
#24
12/10 (A)
12/13 (B)
“We are charred vessels, vestiges of wood & wonder,
anchors tethered to our bows. It is the irony of a ship
burning at sea, surrounded by the very thing that
could save us.”
“For the Boys at
the Bottom of
the Sea,” by
Clint Smith
(poetry)
#25
12/16 (A)
12/17 (B)
“A swallow in flight is graceful, agile, and precise. It hooks,
swoops, dives, twists, and beats. It is a dancer, a musician,
an arrow. Usually. This swallow stumbled from tree to tree.
No arabesques. No gathering speed. Its spotted breast lost
feathers by the fistful. Its eyes were dull. It hit the trunk of
an alder tree and tumbled into the arms of a pine."
The Girl Who
Drank the
Moon, by Kelly
Barnhill
(fiction/fantasy)
Spring 2022 / Quarter 3
# / Date
Sentence / Passage
Source
#1
2/3 (A)
2/4 (B)
“I walked back to my room and collapsed on the
bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was
drizzle and she was a hurricane."
Looking for
Alaska, by John
Green
(YA fiction)
#2
2/7 (A)
2/8 (B)
“This is what I want: I want to grab my brother’s hand
and run back through time, losing years like coats
falling from our shoulders.”
I’ll Give You the
Sun, by Jandy
Nelson (fiction)
#3
2/9 (A)
“It doesn’t matter if divorce shreds the muscles of our
hearts so that they hardly beat without a struggle. It
We Were Liars,
by E. Lockhart
2/10 (B)
doesn’t matter if trust-fund money is running out, if
credit card bills go unpaid on the kitchen counter. It
doesn’t matter if there’s a cluster of pill bottles on the
bedside table. It doesn’t matter if one of us is
desperately, desperately in love.”
(YA fiction)
#4
2/11 (A)
2/14 (B)
"The first time you hit me, I must have been four.
A hand, a flash, a reckoning. My mouth a blaze
of touch."
On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous,
by Ocean Vuong
(fiction/memoir)
#5
2/15 (A)
2/16 (B)
"Happiness is tricky. Sometimes you have to fight for
it. Sometimes, though -- the best times -- it sneaks up
behind you, wraps an arm around your waist, and
pulls you close."
Instructions for
Dancing, by
Nicola Yoon
(YA fiction)
#6
2/28 (A)
3/1 (B)
"There are two things you know. One: you were there.
Two: you couldn't have been there. Holding these two
incompatible truths together takes skill at juggling.”
Challenger Deep,
by Neal
Shusterman
(YA fiction)
#7
3/2 (A)
3/3 (B)
"At your age, I wore a darkness several sizes too big.
It hung on me like a mother’s dress. Even now, as we
speak, I am stitching a darkness you’ll need to
unravel, unraveling another you’ll need to restitch."
Goldenrod, by
Maggie Smith
(poetry
collection)
#8
3/4 (A)
3/7 (B)
“There’s a hint of wind coming over the top of the
stone walls and through the barbed-wire sky on the
day Alexander Stowe was to be Purged.”
The Unwanteds,
by Lisa McMann
(fantasy)
#9
3/8 (A)
3/9 (B)
“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war
is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage
and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and
longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is
thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war
makes you dead.”
The Things They
Carried, by
Tim O’Brien
(fiction/memoir)
#10
3/10 (A)
3/11 (B)
"She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old
self behind and come into her world, and then before
he was really at home in it but too late to go back,
she had left him stranded there — like an astronaut
wandering about on the moon. Alone."
Bridge to
Terabithia, by
Katherine
Paterson (fiction)
#11
3/14 (A)
3/15 (B)
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that
distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice.”
One Hundred
Years of Solitude,
by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez (fiction)
#12
3/16 (A)
3/17 (B)
“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of
abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity,
something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze
and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping
yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are
probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
American Psycho,
by Bret Easton
Ellis (fiction)
#13
“Be warned: we’re about to embark on an arduous
Westworld Review
3/22 (A)
3/23 (B)
journey that features math equations, reality
questioning, Nazis — hell, there’s even a dragon.”
by Daniel Chin
(nonfiction)
#14
3/24 (A)
3/25 (B)
"Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the
highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the
Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional
happenings, had never stopped there."
In Cold Blood, by
Truman Capote
(nonfiction)
#15
3/28 (A)
3/29 (B)
“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my
absence: the connections -- sometimes tenuous, sometimes
made at great cost, but often magnificent -- that
happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a
way that let me hold the world without me in it.”
The Lovely Bones,
by Alice Sebond
(fiction)
Spring 2022 / Quarter 4
# / Date
Sentence / Passage
Source
#16
4/19 (A)
4/20 (B)
“Melancholy slipped her dry, papery hand into mine
as she always did when I thought about my mother,
whose life was so short, whose opportunities were so
few, and whose sacrifices were so great."
The Sympathizer,
by Viet Thanh
Nguyen (fiction)
#17
4/21 (A)
4/22 (B)
“In those early amorphous years when memory had
only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and
no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and
Rahel thought of themselves together as Me."
The God of Small
Things, by
Arundhati Roy
(fiction)
#18
4/25 (A)
4/26 (B)
“The halls surged with a parade of beautiful
strangers. They laughed too loud. Flirted. Shrieked.
Raced. They kissed. Shoved. Tripped. Shouted. Posed.
Chased. Flaunted. Taunted. Galloped. Sang.”
The Impossible
Knife of Memory,
by Laurie Halse
Anderson
(fiction)
#19
4/27 (A)
4/28 (B)
“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted
and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
The Great
Gatsby, by F.
Scott Fitzgerald
(fiction)
#20
4/29 (A)
5/2 (B)
"We cross our bridges as we come to them and burn
them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress
except a memory of the smell of smoke, and the
presumption that once our eyes watered."
Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern Are
Dead, by Tom
Stoppard
(drama)
#21
5/10 (A)
5/11 (B)
“There's a man buried in your kitchen. He's right in
that stack of newspapers there, about three weeks
down: a headline one day, a one-graph follow-up the
next, and a nobody ever since.”
“Next Time, Stop
the Race,” by Rick
Reilly (nonfiction/
sports journalism)
#22
5/12 (A)
5/13 (B)
“My family members could not be more different from
one another. The mix includes one rocket scientist
brother; one fashionista sister; one honey- harvesting,
lover-of-all-creatures-big-and-small mother; and one
classic music enthusiast father. And then there’s me —
a camera junkie and jet-setter with a penchant for
tasty typography (and alliteration.)”
Soul Pancake
Mini Memoir, by
Golriz Lucina
(nonfiction)
#23
5/16 (A)
5/17 (B)
“Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires
on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of
years between eighteen and fifty.”
Station Eleven,
by Emily St. John
Mandel (fiction)
#24
5/18 (A)
5/19 (B)
“Depending on when you met me, I might have been:
a checkers champion, the kid who squirted Super Glue
in his eye, a competitive ping pong player, Tweedle
Dum, a high school valedictorian, a fake blonde, 1/12
of an all-male a cappella group, a graduate of the
Vanderbilt School of Engineering, a nomad, a street
musician, or a pigeon assassin.”
Soul Pancake
Mini Memoir, by
Devon Gundry
(nonfiction)
#25
5/20 (A)
5/23 (B)
“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl,
and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend
his whole life answering."
The History of
Love, by Nicole
Krauss (fiction)