Top 55 Richard Peck Quotes
#2. The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.
Richard Peck
#3. At last she said, Them Burdicks isn't worth the powder and shot to blow them up. They're like a pack of hound dogs. They'll chase livestock, suck eggs, and lick the skillet. And steal? They'd steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke.
Richard Peck
#4. Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.
Richard Peck
#5. With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.
Richard Peck
#8. Grandma, how old is she?"
"Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.
Richard Peck
#9. Because nobody but a reader ever became a writer.
Richard Peck
#10. They'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they? ... Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.
Richard Peck
#11. If you're going to read minds, start with a simple one.
Richard Peck
#12. We write by the light of every book we've read.
Richard Peck
#13. We write by the light of every story we have ever read.
Richard Peck
#14. Besdies, to turn me ladylike might have rendered me useless and possibly ornamental.
Richard Peck
#15. A solider must leave someone behind,' she said. 'What men do best is walk away from women. Wars are handy for that.
Richard Peck
#16. Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.
Richard Peck
#17. Aunt Agnes said, "It's hard to make a good Christian out of a cat.
Richard Peck
#18. [A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.
Richard Peck
#19. Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.
Richard Peck
#20. Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood ...
Richard Peck
#21. The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.
Richard Peck
#22. So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.
Richard Peck
#23. Why she hankered to be a teacher, I couldn't tell you. But she had chalk dust in her veins, and she deserved to get that certificate. It was only fair.
Richard Peck
#24. The sobs came then, faster than she could swallow. A teacher dares not cry, not a real teacher.
Richard Peck
#25. But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.
Richard Peck
#27. If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.
Richard Peck
#28. This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.
Richard Peck
#29. But put two librarians' heads together, and mountains move.
Richard Peck
#30. This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand
how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.
Richard Peck
#31. Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.
Richard Peck
#32. We thought he was weird. He thought we were weird. It was great. It was what multiculturalism ought to be" -Archer
Richard Peck
#34. Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.
Richard Peck
#35. Stay away from people who don't know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who'll want to label you. People who'll try to write their fears on your face.
Richard Peck
#36. I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.
Richard Peck
#37. I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.
Richard Peck
#38. But it was a rich, picture-perfect, it-can't-happen-here kind of suburb where people had gone, not to deal with life's problems, but to avoid them.
Richard Peck
#39. And I'll tell you something else for free. If you set a foot over that doorsill, I'll wring your red neck.
Richard Peck
#40. Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds.
Richard Peck
#41. I don't think grandma's a very good influence on us.
Richard Peck
#42. When I read a good book, it's like traveling the world without ever leaving my chair.
Richard Peck
#43. A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.
Richard Peck
#44. We'd gotten him wrong. He wasn't a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he'd seen us all a good deal clearer than we'd ever seen him.
Richard Peck
#45. The trenches are all filled in, but the boys are still dying.'
Then I could read her thoughts and I knew what this day meant. Mrs. Abernathy's son could have been my dad.
Richard Peck
#47. She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.
Richard Peck
#48. We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.
Richard Peck
#49. And don't look for anything out of the law around here," she said. "The Cowgills and the Leapers is kin to the sheriff. No justice in these parts. It's every man for hisself."
"But as the saying goes, if you can't get justice," Mrs. Dowdel remarked, "get even.
Richard Peck
#50. Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.
Richard Peck
#51. He pulls the tape off Allegra's mouth. Grabs her BY THE HAIR and gives her a peck on the lips.
Richard Kadrey
#52. Yes, I think you'll find that all the best teachers are old bats.
Richard Peck
#54. As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.
Richard Peck
#55. That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.
Richard Peck
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