Top 100 Katherine Paterson Quotes
#1. Someday, when he was good enough, he would ask her to write them in a book and let him do all the pictures.
Katherine Paterson
#2. He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.
Katherine Paterson
#3. Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.
Katherine Paterson
#4. I stood there and watched thirty-five children disappear in almost as many different directions and was suddenly horrified by what I'd done. What if someone got lost or hurt? Suppose they didn't come back on time? What would I do then?
Katherine Paterson
#5. Leslie was one of those people who sat quietly at her desk, never whispering or daydreaming or chewing gum, doing beautiful schoolwork, and yet her brain was so full of mischief that if the teacher could have once seen through that mask of perfection, she would have thrown her out in horror.
Katherine Paterson
#6. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#7. If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
Katherine Paterson
#8. The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.
Katherine Paterson
#9. One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn't finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason.
Katherine Paterson
#10. Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.
Katherine Paterson
#11. Sometimes you have to favor your heel, even if it means you're hurting your toe.
Katherine Paterson
#12. There was one path across Boston Commons that a young man must not ask a young woman to take unless he meant business. Which path was that? she asked Holmes. "Ah," she remembered the elderly doctor saying, "if I were only fifty years younger I would show you.
Katherine Paterson
#14. Dammit, Trotter. Don't try to make a stinking Christian out of me.
Katherine Paterson
#16. He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.
Katherine Paterson
#17. What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.
Katherine Paterson
#18. Daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother's hair gray.
Katherine Paterson
#19. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#20. I ain't got no blood claim on you, and the Lord in Heaven knows I want you to have a good life with your own people. But" - her huge bass voice broke up into little squeaky pieces - "but it's killing me to see you go.
Katherine Paterson
#21. All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
Katherine Paterson
#22. I'd like for the young people, and older ones, too, who don't count themselves as readers, to know the joy of reading and what it does to enrich your life in so many ways.
Katherine Paterson
#23. All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.
Katherine Paterson
#25. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#26. Brenda's pouting voice broke in, Your girl friend's dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.
Katherine Paterson
#27. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#28. I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.
Katherine Paterson
#30. Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.
Katherine Paterson
#31. Drive them out utterly, so they may never return and prey upon our people.
Katherine Paterson
#32. In each of the separate sections Mother would put a different treat - sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, watermelon seeds, sesame cookies, and peanuts.
Katherine Paterson
#33. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#34. I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.
Katherine Paterson
#35. You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
Katherine Paterson
#37. We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds ... We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.
Katherine Paterson
#38. When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget ... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.
Katherine Paterson
#39. Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn't get used to it.
Katherine Paterson
#40. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#42. Ain't 'cha gonna run?" she asked.
"No," he said, shoving the sheet away. "I'm gonna fly.
Katherine Paterson
#44. You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.
Katherine Paterson
#46. She wasn't scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light
Katherine Paterson
#47. A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.
Katherine Paterson
#48. I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.
Katherine Paterson
#50. The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved.
Katherine Paterson
#52. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#53. If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?
Katherine Paterson
#54. Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.
Katherine Paterson
#55. She had nothing against any of the other guests, but once she started she saw no way to stop. There was nothing to do but turn the hose against every arriving guest. No one coming out of the house to reason with her was safe either.
Katherine Paterson
#56. Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her. Not the kind of silly stuff Ellie and Brenda giggled about on the telephone. This was too real and too deep to talk about, even to think about very much.
Katherine Paterson
#57. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#58. to my father's amazement, was an ancient but clearly recognizable painting of Marco Polo, who must have visited Huai'an during his thirteenth-century travels about China. The priest asked my father to donate a picture of Jesus for his collection, and, after thinking about it, Daddy did.
Katherine Paterson
#60. Leslie named their secret land "Terabithia," and she loaned Jess all of her books about Narnia, so he would know how things went in a magic kingdom - how the animals and the trees must be protected and how a ruler must behave.
Katherine Paterson
#61. February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.
Katherine Paterson
#62. So we children must be thankful to the imperious Dr. Young for making it possible for our parents to meet and our subsequent births.
Katherine Paterson
#63. when I am in a foreign city and feel even the slightest bit disoriented, I can feel the panic of that day on the Hong Kong street begin to rise in my chest. My story of being lost ended quickly and happily, but it still haunts me.
Katherine Paterson
#64. I had so looked forward to her walking." Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. "Walk to Daddy," Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the few steps across the space to her father's chair.
Katherine Paterson
#65. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.
Katherine Paterson
#66. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#67. 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 ...
Katherine Paterson
#68. Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.
Katherine Paterson
#69. It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.
Katherine Paterson
#70. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#71. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#73. Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.
Katherine Paterson
#74. He nodded vigorously. Anything was better than promising to fight Janice Avery.
Katherine Paterson
#75. Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Katherine Paterson
#76. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#77. I like to write about a lot of things, which is why my books are different. This is probably why I don't like to write sequels, but chiefly I like to write about people.
Katherine Paterson
#78. He could usually get outdoors without waking Momma or Ellie or Brenda or Joyce Ann.
Katherine Paterson
#79. A novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
Katherine Paterson
#80. My heart is heavy, she thought. It's not just a saying. It is what is - heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.
Katherine Paterson
#81. 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?
Katherine Paterson
#82. You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.
Katherine Paterson
#83. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#85. I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.
Katherine Paterson
#86. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#87. Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.
Katherine Paterson
#88. How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life about him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry fossil upon the page?
Katherine Paterson
#89. One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.
Katherine Paterson
#91. The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.
Katherine Paterson
#92. all my ancestors were from the South and some even fought and died for the losing side. Perhaps that's why I was long resigned to my failure to publish.
Katherine Paterson
#93. To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.
Katherine Paterson
#95. Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
Katherine Paterson
#96. Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.
Katherine Paterson
#97. watched in horror until Walter Cronkite finally announced the news that Kennedy was dead. The boys didn't try to argue about the stupidity of the ancient Hebrews again.
Katherine Paterson
#98. A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language.
Katherine Paterson
#99. I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.
Katherine Paterson
#100. You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.
Katherine Paterson
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
