Top 100 Katherine Paterson Quotes
#1. St. Faith's, as she called her compound, was financed entirely by donations, some from friends abroad and some from admiring Chinese benefactors.
Katherine Paterson
#2. You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.
Katherine Paterson
#4. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#5. It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.
Katherine Paterson
#7. Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.
Katherine Paterson
#8. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#9. Ain't 'cha gonna run?" she asked.
"No," he said, shoving the sheet away. "I'm gonna fly.
Katherine Paterson
#10. Then Jess gave himself over to the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from a corner of his brain.
Katherine Paterson
#12. But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz
God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.
Katherine Paterson
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds ... We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.
Katherine Paterson
#18. Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.
Katherine Paterson
#20. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#21. You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
Katherine Paterson
#22. Win was flabbergasted when he heard me say to the dog: We don't put our paws on the table while folks are eating, Manch.
Katherine Paterson
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. In each of the separate sections Mother would put a different treat - sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, watermelon seeds, sesame cookies, and peanuts.
Katherine Paterson
#27. 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
#30. Jess wouldn't argue that, but he saw her as a beautiful wild creature who had been caught for a moment in that dirty old cage of a schoolhouse, perhaps by mistake.
Katherine Paterson
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. It was a three-dimensional nightmare version of some of his own drawings.
Katherine Paterson
#38. I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.
Katherine Paterson
#39. Drive them out utterly, so they may never return and prey upon our people.
Katherine Paterson
#40. Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self - his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.
Katherine Paterson
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. We do have trouble dealing with death, but it's the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.
Katherine Paterson
#46. 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
#47. Don't tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don't need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you're after, my dear.
Katherine Paterson
#48. suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We
Katherine Paterson
#49. A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.
Katherine Paterson
#50. She wasn't scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light
Katherine Paterson
#51. 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
#52. He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.
Katherine Paterson
#54. Dammit, Trotter. Don't try to make a stinking Christian out of me.
Katherine Paterson
#55. Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.
Katherine Paterson
#56. Jess followed, still trying to figure out why two grown people and a smart girl like Leslie wanted to leave a comfortable life in the suburbs for a place like this. They watched the bus roar off.
Katherine Paterson
#58. 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
#59. Sometimes you have to favor your heel, even if it means you're hurting your toe.
Katherine Paterson
#60. Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.
Katherine Paterson
#61. 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
#62. The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.
Katherine Paterson
#63. Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter,
Katherine Paterson
#64. Once a book is published, it no longer belongs to me. My creative task is done. The work now belongs to the creative mind of my readers. I had my turn to make of it what I would, now it is their turn.
Katherine Paterson
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.
Katherine Paterson
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#70. Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.
Katherine Paterson
#72. If life is so bad, how come you're so happy?" "Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?
Katherine Paterson
#73. 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
#74. Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.
Katherine Paterson
#75. 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
#76. Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.
Katherine Paterson
#77. I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.
Katherine Paterson
#78. As much pleasure as young people get from Twittering and texting, there is no way these activities will nourish their minds and spirits the way literature can.
Katherine Paterson
#79. Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.
Katherine Paterson
#80. 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.
Katherine Paterson
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Brenda's pouting voice broke in, Your girl friend's dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.
Katherine Paterson
#85. 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
#86. I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.
Katherine Paterson
#88. Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'
Katherine Paterson
#89. I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?
Katherine Paterson
#90. 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
#91. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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."
Katherine Paterson
#97. This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.
Katherine Paterson
#98. 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
#99. What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.
Katherine Paterson
#100. If you wanted to greet him or get his attention, you had to say: "Oh, Mr. Forest-Ranger-who-stands-in-the-tower-watching-out-for-forest fires!" If you abbreviated it, or, heaven help us, addressed him simply as "David," you would get no response.
Katherine Paterson
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