Katherine Paterson Quotes - Page 2

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.

It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.

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.

What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.

...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.

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.

Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire.

Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

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.

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.

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.

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

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.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

I think, she began quietly, I think we want... not just bread for our bellies. We want more than only bread. We want food for our hearts, our souls. We want- how to say it? We want, you know- Puccini music.... we want for our beautiful children some beauty. She leaned over and kissed the curl on her finger. We want roses.

I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.