Katherine Paterson Quotes

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations- something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.

To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.

Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

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.

A dream without a plan is just a wish

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.

A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.

A library is a feast to which we are all invited.

We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story.

Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.

My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.

We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story. And somehow, miraculously, a story that comes from deep in my heart calls from a reader that which is deepest in his or her heart, and together from our secret hidden selves we create a story that neither of us could have told alone.

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

Youth is a mortal wound.

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.

Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do.

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.

Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.

I am called to listen to the sound of my own heart -- to write the story within myself that demands to be told at that particular point in my life. And if I do this faithfully, clothing that idea in the flesh of human experience and setting it in a true place, the sound from my heart will resound in the reader's heart.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.