Walter Dean Myers quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Walter Dean Myers

Walter Dean Myers Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Walter Dean Myers on Wise Famous Quotes.

She is a moron and too dumb to menstruate straight.
perhaps the best line from Shooter

America believes what's good for us is good for the world. It's very difficult to understand that that's not necessarily true.

We all think we're different, but when it comes around, we end up needing the same things. Somebody to love us. Somebody to respect us.

Think about all the tomorrows of your life.

My life is not packaged,
Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged
Edges that cut even my friends.

That's what's wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don't even tell you how they feel.

Let me think
Thinking is all I have
If wisdom is a pretense
Then let me pretend to be wise

As a child I wanted to be a professional athlete or lawyer.

The idea of voluntary segregation went against every value I had been taught. What did being born black have to do with excellence?

People who want to hate you can find something in you they don't like. They have a talent for doing that.

Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war.

I couldn't speak well. I went to speech therapy for 10 years. And I was sort of frustrated in that sense.

Reading is not optional.

We all know we should eat right and we should exercise, but reading is treated as if it's this wonderful adjunct.

Tests were always easy for me. I saw them as games, saw myself as being in a contest against a mythical adversary, and welcomed the challenge.

Maybe being loved wasn't enough; maybe there was something else you needed not to get in trouble.

Yeah, that's funny, huh? ... Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are.

She is the only rose that doesn't smell of plastic

Can you become The hope I need? Can you help me be More than it is written in my future Or past? Is there another me to find?

If you know you don't have a win, then there's no use for you being in the game.

How deep is your game?

Each of us is born with a history already in place

I wrote for magazines. I wrote adventure stuff, I wrote for the 'National Enquirer,' I wrote advertising copy for cemeteries.

The lure of seeing new places, different ways of life, has been almost irresistible.

once i began to read I began to exist

The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.

What did I do? I walked into a drugstore to look for some mints, and then I walked out. What was wrong with that? I didn't kill Mr. Nesbitt.

If what I read doesn't reflect my life - whether I'm gay or Latino or on welfare - doesn't that really mean that my life is not valuable?

My dad was a janitor for U.S. Radium Corporation, and he stayed there for 37 years. So he didn't read.

Children have adopted a consumerist attitude - I dare you to entertain me.

If I'm going to have a fight I got to see the win in it so I'll know what I'm fighting for.

New York is my favorite city.

We dreamed a lot of good stuff. Marriage and forever and ever and that kind of thing. It meant everything to me. Not just a lot. Everything.

Many teens will see themselves in Myers' account.

Drew, your enemies can mess your life up,' he said. 'Or they can make it easy for you to do it to yourself.'
- Fletch

When we feel powerless, we stop trying to find a better way.

I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott.

Each time I think there is no place lower to go, I find that there is at least one place that will mess you up worse than you were.

Hard work by itself isn't worth two cents on a rainy day if it doesn't give you a good life.

Violence was just as much about WHAT was happening as it was how it happened.

It's a hard life sometimes and the biggest temptation is to let how hard it is be an excuse to weaken

I am very much interested in getting parents to read to children, and trying to get people mentoring children. If I can do both I'll be happy.

The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that's not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can't kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.

Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.

The ideas I found in books helped me imagine a life I wanted to live.

Sometimes, when things look terrible ... you just need to find the right move to turn the whole game around. When you find it you feel great.

You're not getting in anything, so between us it's going to be outcest, and that's just another word for friendship.
- Jocelyn Lawson

Idiots don't know they're idiots, which is unfortunate.

He was trying to convince himself that he wasn't guilty.

But now, like a fallen sparrow On a golden chain, I'm forever bound in shadow, A prisoner to my pain.

When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.

I'll never live to write all the stories I have in my head.

I just wanted to be a human being. I just wanted to be whoever I saw in the mirror, without a race or a place in life. What is so wrong with that?

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

There is a crisis involving reading in certain communities.

I talk to myself out loud at times, and feel embarrassed when people overhear me.

Fools commit suicide and think they're doing themselves a favor.

On the streets of the city They have taken my Who-I-Am As well as my What-I-Was And now I am desperate for them both Again

Nothing sounds better than being away from this mess. Nothing sounds better right now than getting higher than the hole I'm in.

I want young people to be hesitant to glorify war and to demand of their leaders justification for the sacrifices they ask of our citizens.

I know what falling off the cliff means. I know from being considered a very bright kid to being considered like a moron and dropping out of school.

The beast is the monster that destroys your dream

Things that matter in the morning somehow don't matter in the afternoon.

Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?

I am too real not to know that real will kill me
I am too street not to know what the streets hold
for me

All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.

You cannot live this life anymore without the ability to read.

My job is to make sure the law works for you as well as against you, and to make you a human being in the eyes of the jury.