Katherine Paterson Quotes - Page 3

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

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.

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.

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.

I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.

Lord, let me heed the angels you put in my path.

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.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

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.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

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.'

I do know that I need solitude, not only to write but to nourish myself (being, like most writers, an introvert) so that I do keep trying to write.

When people ask me what qualifies me to be a writer for children, I say I was once a child. But I was not only a child, I was, better still, a weird little kid, and though I would never choose to give my own children this particular preparation for life, there are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.

What I have come to believe is that joy is the twin sister of gratitude. I am most joyful when I am most grateful.

. . . Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside himself like a pirate treasure. He was rich, very rich, but no one could know about it for now except his fellow outlaw, Julia Edmunds.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

Trouble can always be borne when it is shared.

He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.