Katherine Paterson
Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.Collection: Fear
the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.Collection: People
Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.Collection: Lord
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.Collection: Home
That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.Collection: Believe
I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.Collection: Powerful
The children's book world has given me wonderful friendships and an unbelievably rich life.Collection: Children
More than fifty years ago Sputnik dramatically raised the nation's awareness of what was lacking in science and math education in America. What we need to wake people up to now is the crisis in imagination and concern for the greater good.Collection: Math
We can read the paper or current magazines and learn about national and world events, think about controversial subjects, learn how to disagree respectfully, and how, finally, to act on our convictions. We can read for pure delight, and if we do this as a family or classroom or other group we can build wonderful memories.Collection: Memories
We book people are always preaching about reading aloud to children, but unless you do, you can't realize how it enriches family life.Collection: Children
What I really want to do is to write a hilarious farce.Collection: Writing
Since my first novel was rescued from a slush pile, it makes me sad that most publishing houses no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. Nor are many willing to take chances on novels that are not deemed immediately "marketable."Collection: Publishing House
What we need to wake people up to now is the crisis in imagination and concern for the greater good. We have no idea what the next ten years, much less the next fifty years, will demand of the coming generation. What we do know is that unless we have a people prepared and eager to meet those crises creatively and compassionately, there is not much hope for this poor old planet of ours.Collection: Years
Teachers have almost stopped reading aloud to their classes because of the pressure of testing and tight curricula, but it is the books we read together and talk about together that bring us closer together.Collection: Teacher
I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.Collection: Morning
You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.Collection: Knows
He [an earnest young reporter] seemed to share the view of many intelligent, well-educated, well-meaning people that, while adult literature may aim to be art, the object of children's books is to whip the little rascals into shape.Collection: Art
Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.Collection: Fun
The gift of creative reading, like all natural gifts, must be nourished or it will atrophy. And you nourish it, in much the same way you nourish the gift of writing - you read, think, talk, look, listen, hate, fear, love, weep - and bring all of your life like a sieve to what you read. That which is not worthy of your gift will quickly pass through, but the gold remains.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Life
On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.Collection: Running
It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.Collection: Scare
You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Writing
Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious.Collection: Humanity
It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.Collection: Eye
We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.Collection: Mistake
a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.Collection: Strong
Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.Collection: Crazy
The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.Collection: Years
Shh" he said. "Look." "Where?" "Can't you see'um?" he whispered. "All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you." "Me?" "Shh, yes. There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arrving today might be the queen they've been waiting for.Collection: Beautiful
The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.Collection: Hurt
life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe toughCollection: Tough
All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.Collection: Children
You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.Collection: Giving Up
You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.Collection: Husband
We humans have had from time unknown the compulsion to name things and thus to be able to deal with them. The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. And in ancient thought the name itself has power, so that to know someone's name is to have a certain power over him. And in some societies, as you know, there was a public name and a real or secret name, which would not be revealed to others.Collection: Attitude
The work reveals the creator - and as our universe in its vastness, its orderliness, its exquisite detail, tells us something of the One who made it, so a work of fiction, for better or worse, will reveal the writer.Collection: Details
It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.Collection: Caring
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.Collection: Knowing
One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.Collection: Art
The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.Collection: Art
Lord, let me heed the angels you put in my path.Collection: Inspirational
Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.Collection: Doctors
...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.Collection: Children
...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)Collection: Beautiful
I do know that I need solitude, not only to write but to nourish myself (being, like most writers, an introvert) so that I do keep trying to write.Collection: Writing
When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and though I would never choose to give my own children this particular preparation for life, there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.Collection: Children