Top 100 Walter Dean Myers Quotes
#1. In a sane world, we would be heroes. Teachers would applaud as we walked into the school. There is the smart one, the one who wants to be a writer. And there is the runner.
Walter Dean Myers
#2. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#4. People want to look at you and see your whole future laid out the way they know it, and I was saying that didn't happen. People aren't born with I'M GREAT! flashing on their foreheads.
Walter Dean Myers
#5. What I do with my books is to create windows to my world that all may peer into. I share the images, the feelings and thoughts, and, I hope, the delight.
Walter Dean Myers
#6. People who want to hate you can find something in you they don't like. They have a talent for doing that.
Walter Dean Myers
#7. Violence was just as much about WHAT was happening as it was how it happened.
Walter Dean Myers
#8. When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life ... I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.
Walter Dean Myers
#9. Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.
Walter Dean Myers
#11. My dad was a janitor for U.S. Radium Corporation, and he stayed there for 37 years. So he didn't read.
Walter Dean Myers
#12. Within the black community, roughly 60 percent of children are born to single moms. Moms don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with their children. Their English is atrocious. Their speaking is atrocious. The dropout rate is horrendous.
Walter Dean Myers
#13. There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.
Walter Dean Myers
#14. Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?
Walter Dean Myers
#16. We had tasted what it was like being dead. We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us. We weren't all right. We would have to learn to be alive again.
Walter Dean Myers
#17. Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.
Walter Dean Myers
#18. 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?
Walter Dean Myers
#19. I was teased if I brought my books home. I would take a paper bag to the library and put the books in the bag and bring them home. Not that I was that concerned about them teasing me - because I would hit them in a heartbeat. But I felt a little ashamed, having books.
Walter Dean Myers
#20. I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.
Walter Dean Myers
#21. One of the problems is that kids who don't read - who are not doing well in school - they know they're not doing well. And they want everyone to be in that same category.
Walter Dean Myers
#22. I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.' That's what I would like to do.
Walter Dean Myers
#23. No matter what ... ball made my heart beat faster, made me want to jump up and down and be Superman. That's what life was about anyway, being Superman and living like life itself was important. Basketball made my life important.
Walter Dean Myers
#24. Yes, she is the fruit that will Sustain me and yes, she brings A rain that I know can chill But it is a rain so sweet and sings A song my soul insists That I follow, if I would exist As more than I have ever, ever been If my mother calls it evil, then I embrace the sin
Walter Dean Myers
#25. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#26. I talk to myself out loud at times, and feel embarrassed when people overhear me.
Walter Dean Myers
#27. Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony.
Walter Dean Myers
#28. Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.
Walter Dean Myers
#29. If I'm going to be pushed off the sidewalk, I might as well step on off. You know what I mean? Stop pretending something good was waiting around the corner and be what everybody expected me to be, which was another throwaway dude.
- Lil J
Walter Dean Myers
#30. We all know we should eat right and we should exercise, but reading is treated as if it's this wonderful adjunct.
Walter Dean Myers
#31. My younger brother's death in Vietnam was both sobering and cause for reflection. In 'Fallen Angels' I wanted to dispel the notion of war as either romantic or simplistically heroic.
Walter Dean Myers
#32. As a kid I didn't see black cowboys on the screen. What that said to me was that there were things I couldn't do or be because of my color. What we see others like us do gives us permission to expand our own horizons.
Walter Dean Myers
#33. All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
Walter Dean Myers
#35. I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?
Walter Dean Myers
#36. There was a baseball game on but it didn't look real. It was guys in uniforms playing games on a deep green field. They were playing baseball as if baseball was important and as if all the world wasn't in jail, watching them from a completely different world.
Walter Dean Myers
#37. Growing up in Harlem, I had the chance to practice with a Negro League team. At fifteen, I was over six feet tall and a fair athlete, but my skills didn't come close to some of the players I saw.
Walter Dean Myers
#38. Sometimes when things get hard, we tend to set our sights on what's hard, that difficult thing that keeps us upset, and we turn our back on our strengths.
Walter Dean Myers
#39. If anyone could look into my head See or feel the dread that has captured Me or see within this sad, unhappy brain They would only turn away Turn away.
Walter Dean Myers
#40. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#41. The idea of voluntary segregation went against every value I had been taught. What did being born black have to do with excellence?
Walter Dean Myers
#42. Fifty percent of all meaningful education takes place in the home. What do you share with your child? You share your interests. I was a book person. I read with my son. My wife is an artist. She dragged his little butt around to museums. He's an illustrator of children's books.
Walter Dean Myers
#43. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#44. I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?
Walter Dean Myers
#45. Let me think
Thinking is all I have
If wisdom is a pretense
Then let me pretend to be wise
Walter Dean Myers
#46. People still try to sell books that way - as 'books can take you to foreign lands.' We've given children this idea that reading and books are a nice option, if you want that kind of thing. I hope we can get over that idea.
Walter Dean Myers
#47. Sometimes everybody touches in the dark. You touch to see what you can stand to touch, what you can to feel with your fingers probing parts you never though you could probably probe - Gray
Walter Dean Myers
#48. I mean, if you think about doing things to people like that, if you think about it too much, it gets all up in you and you can't control it after a while. Then they really got you.
Walter Dean Myers
#51. That's the thing people can't see when they're explaining to your butt what's going on and how you messing up. They can't see that you knew it long before they did.
Walter Dean Myers
#52. The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.
Walter Dean Myers
#53. Looks to me like you've been making garbage for a while and dragging it with you. Now you need to get out of here, and that garbage is weighing you down.
Walter Dean Myers
#54. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#55. When we think of war, the tendency is to picture young soldiers only in their military roles. To a large extent this dehumanizes the soldiers and makes it easier for society to commit them to combat.
Walter Dean Myers
#56. I think it's difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They're embarrassed to have people see them doing it.
Walter Dean Myers
#58. There have been two areas identified as being vital to reading - and that's for very young children between the ages of one month and five years and for teenagers. I've been trying to find ways of approaching both groups.
Walter Dean Myers
#60. Books have always been among my most trusted of friends, Mr. Linden replied. The best of them allow the mind to wander wherever the author's musings lead.
Walter Dean Myers
#61. My life is not packaged,
Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged
Edges that cut even my friends.
Walter Dean Myers
#62. As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.
Walter Dean Myers
#63. I remember one time being told I could not play in a basketball game at the College of William and Mary because I was black, even though I was playing with a United States Army team.
Walter Dean Myers
#64. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#65. I think that if we can't go back, then we should try even harder to go forward. And I do want to go forward, to a place where loving someone because they have a gentle smile and a friendly hello is as easy as it once was.
Walter Dean Myers
#66. That night the mosquitoes ate us up. I had bites all over my body. Back home I thought mosquitoes never bit black people. Not as much as they bit white people, anyway. Maybe Vietnamese mosquitoes just bit blacks and whites and didn't bite Asians.
Walter Dean Myers
#67. Go. Think. Turn black into white.
Night into day. I am tired of thinking.
I know where it will lead me and I don't
Want to be there.
Go love. Do your thinking.
Walter Dean Myers
#68. Forever in your arms
Is where I want to be
Holding you close
Within the space
That once held only me ...
Forever in your warmth
The place for me and you
I feel the sun
Our life's just begun
I know you feel it too
Walter Dean Myers
#69. I couldn't speak well. I went to speech therapy for 10 years. And I was sort of frustrated in that sense.
Walter Dean Myers
#70. Pain is the only real emotion. Everything else can be taken away. Love,happiness,joy can always be taken away. Even old sadness can be dissipated if you pee enough ha-ha into it. But pain is pure
Walter Dean Myers
#74. I didn't even know for years that people ever even got paid for this, because they don't teach you that in school. They don't say Shakespeare got a check.
Walter Dean Myers
#75. When you see a filmmaker getting too fancy... you can bet he's worried either about his story or his ability to tell it.
Walter Dean Myers
#76. 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
Walter Dean Myers
#77. I'm not out here looking for no garbage cans to curl up in. I'm looking for the same good dreams everybody else is hoping for, but I don't see where they are. Or maybe I see where they are, but I don't see how to get there.
Walter Dean Myers
#78. And what I was feeling was the wonder Of being more than me, of being more Than mere here and now allowed I had become a shining star, a burning nova Exploded with love Flying through an endlessly Expanding universe Away from the me that was Toward a me that is beyond Understanding.
Walter Dean Myers
#79. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#80. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#81. I admired the work ethic of the cowboys I read about. The idea of these young people taking on this much responsibility was impressive. I would like modern readers to have an appreciation of this.
Walter Dean Myers
#82. Life is going to be harder for some people. It's going to be harder at different times in our lives. But if you're not ready to die today, then you're going to be responsible for tomorrow, whether you like it or not.
Walter Dean Myers
#83. I came to Harlem from West Virginia when I was three, after my mother died. My father, who was very poor, gave me up to two wonderful people, my foster parents.
Walter Dean Myers
#84. Nothing sounds better than being away from this mess. Nothing sounds better right now than getting higher than the hole I'm in.
Walter Dean Myers
#85. After so many books and so many years of writing, I have a good idea of my strengths and weaknesses. I love the process of writing and, if I allowed myself, I would write far too much every day. One weakness which I've struggled to overcome is my tendency to having my characters ruminate for pages.
Walter Dean Myers
#86. America believes what's good for us is good for the world. It's very difficult to understand that that's not necessarily true.
Walter Dean Myers
#87. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#88. The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena.
Walter Dean Myers
#89. So many organizations have a mentoring arm, but they don't really do it. Their idea of mentoring a kid is giving them general advice. But what they need to do is read with children.
Walter Dean Myers
#90. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#91. I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott.
Walter Dean Myers
#92. I wrote for magazines. I wrote adventure stuff, I wrote for the 'National Enquirer,' I wrote advertising copy for cemeteries.
Walter Dean Myers
#93. It's a hard life sometimes and the biggest temptation is to let how hard it is be an excuse to weaken
Walter Dean Myers
#94. 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?
Walter Dean Myers
#96. 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.
Walter Dean Myers
#97. Hard work by itself isn't worth two cents on a rainy day if it doesn't give you a good life.
Walter Dean Myers
#98. Drew, your enemies can mess your life up,' he said. 'Or they can make it easy for you to do it to yourself.'
- Fletch
Walter Dean Myers
#99. I live intimately with my characters before starting a book. I cut out pictures of them for my wall. I do time lines for each major character and a time line for the entire novel: What is going on in the world as my characters struggle with their problems?
Walter Dean Myers
#100. Maybe being loved wasn't enough; maybe there was something else you needed not to get in trouble.
Walter Dean Myers
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