Betsy Byars Quotes

#1. When one is young, he thought, one thinks that one will never know oneself. But the knowledge comes later; if not all, then some. An important amount.

Amanda Coplin

#2. When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'll have a book.

Betsy Byars

#3. Never be afraid to love. Just be careful who you love.

Carlos Wallace

#4. That was the trouble with life - it never quite fulfilled its promises.

Betsy Byars

#5. If a big person invests time in reading, kids learn reading is important, the child is important, words are important, stories are important.

Gail Carson Levine

#6. It was as if her life was a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed. The same stones shaken, no longer made the same design.

Betsy Byars

#7. Out of the nursery into the college and back into the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

Ray Bradbury

#8. Writing is like anything - baseball playing, piano playing, sewing, hammering nails. The more you work on it, the better you get. But it seems to take a longer time to get better at writing than hammering nails.

Betsy Byars

#9. Early in my career, I decided not to do sequels. I know that children enjoy them, but I valued the feeling that this was the only time I would write about these characters. I felt it gave me an added incentive to do my best by them, to tell readers everything I knew, to hold nothing back.

Betsy Byars

#10. I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it.

Christa Wolf

#11. We train very hard under windy conditions. I've actually walked a wire in my backyard with 90-mile-an-hour winds.

Nik Wallenda

#12. She leaped onto the serpent's head and scratched and growled like a really angry black wig.

Rick Riordan

#13. People kill for love. They die for love.

Helen Fisher

#14. French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.

David Graddol

#15. My own hobbies are rather quiet. I like to read and do needlework, and I love animals.

Betsy Byars

#16. Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

#17. I'm here, Dr. Fein, because it upsets my mom that I'm having an impossible time with my life." "Should it upset her?" "Not really. Life is impossible.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#18. I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.

Betsy Byars

#19. For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

Betsy Byars

#20. Hour of nostalgia, hour of happiness, hour of solitude.

Pablo Neruda

#21. The real reason I had wanted to grow up, the main reason I had been willing to even consider becoming an adult, was so I could have as many pets as I wanted.

Betsy Byars

#22. It means I'm glad I killed him, I said, testing it. But this didn't mean anything.

It didn't mean anything, I said, dubious.

But this didn't mean anything, either.

Pablo D'Stair

#23. I think how you look is the most important thing in the world. If you look cute, you are cute; if you look smart, you are smart, and if you don't look like anything, you aren't anything.

Betsy Byars

#24. The people you don't know turn out to be exactly like the people you do know, same faults, same everything.

Betsy Byars

#25. I love writing. I've pursued it with a passion.

Betsy Byars

#26. All great men have declared that they owe their sucess to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.

O. Henry

#27. I have cried over myself a hundred times this summer, she thought, I have wept over my big feet and my skinny legs and my nose, I have even cried over my stupid shoes, and now when I have true sadness there are no tears left.

Betsy Byars