Katherine Paterson Quotes

Win was flabbergasted when he heard me say to the dog: We don't put our paws on the table while folks are eating, Manch.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.

What I have come to believe is that joy is the twin sister of gratitude. I am most joyful when I am most grateful.

Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.

Sometimes you have to favor your heel, even if it means you're hurting your toe.

Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.

She wasn't scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light

To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.

What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.

You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.

Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.

He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.

Then Jess gave himself over to the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from a corner of his brain.

Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.

You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.

It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.

Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self - his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.

I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name - John Goetchius - but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.

A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.

soldiers on the banks of the canal, they looked carefully to see whether they were Japanese or Chinese so they'd know which pass to pull out.

Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.

If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?

The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved.

It was a three-dimensional nightmare version of some of his own drawings.

He nodded vigorously. Anything was better than promising to fight Janice Avery.

John softened, and many years later he said to me, "You know, if we were ever to divorce, I get the cat." There is a

Life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough

Jess's feelings about Leslie's father poked up like a canker sore. You keep biting it, and it gets bigger and worse instead of better.

St. Faith's, as she called her compound, was financed entirely by donations, some from friends abroad and some from admiring Chinese benefactors.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

Someday, when he was good enough, he would ask her to write them in a book and let him do all the pictures.

Lord, let me heed the angels you put in my path.

A library is a feast to which we are all invited.

Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.

Dammit, Trotter. Don't try to make a stinking Christian out of me.

Youth is a mortal wound.

Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

a dream without a plan is just a wish

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.

But he was long-legged for a ten-year-old,

Trouble can always be borne when it is shared.

It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

So we children must be thankful to the imperious Dr. Young for making it possible for our parents to meet and our subsequent births.

I just can't get the poetry of the trees," he said.

Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do.

Just close your eyes and keep your mind wide open

You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.

Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.

Could be a magic country like Narnia, and the only way you can get in is by swinging across on this enchanted rope.

Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'

February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.

He could usually get outdoors without waking Momma or Ellie or Brenda or Joyce Ann.

You're the proverbial diamond in the rough", she'd said to him once, touching his nose lightly with the tip of her electrifying finger.

I love revisions ... We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

I'm a great believer in research. I have to know about a place before I write a story that is set in that place.

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.

Brenda's pouting voice broke in, Your girl friend's dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

A work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire.

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds ... We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

I don't care. I don't care". He was crying now, crying so hard he could barely breathe.

It seemed to Gilly that everything in this world that you can't stand to wait one extra minute for is always late.

A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language.

You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.

In each of the separate sections Mother would put a different treat - sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, watermelon seeds, sesame cookies, and peanuts.

Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter,

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

Ain't 'cha gonna run?" she asked.
"No," he said, shoving the sheet away. "I'm gonna fly.

The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.

Drive them out utterly, so they may never return and prey upon our people.

A novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.