Katherine Paterson famous quotes

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

#Attitude #Positivity #Names

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

#Inspirational #Fear #Swings

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

#Real #Writing #Order

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

#Heart #Suicidal #Thinking

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Children #Book #School

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

#Ice Cream #Revision #Milk

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

#Husband #People #Trying

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Taken #Writing #Looks

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

#Children #Writing

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

#Reading #Garden #Keys

Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Hopeful #Feelings

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

#Library

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

#Scare

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

#Book #Kind #Changed

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

#Inspirational #Angel #Path

You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Thinking #Cry #Wells

You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.
-- Katherine Paterson

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Heart #Stones #Looks

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Home #Moon #Self

a novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Strong #Writing #Ideas

We humans have had from time unknown the compulsion to name things and thus to be able to deal with them. The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. And in ancient thought the name itself has power, so that to know someone's name is to have a certain power over him. And in some societies, as you know, there was a public name and a real or secret name, which would not be revealed to others.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Attitude #Real #Names

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

#Mean #August #Bully

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Happiness #Attitude #Children

...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)
-- Katherine Paterson

#Beautiful #Long #Might

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Children #Kids #People

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

#War #Loss #Reality

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

#Defense #February #Malicious

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

#People #February #Reason

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

#Details #Fiction #Vastness

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Book #Writing #Thinking

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

#Fire #Wells

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

#May #Born #Guts

Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Dream #School #Thinking

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Doctors #Water #Giving

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Real #Book #People

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Mistake #Path #Honorable

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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Lying #Mean #Heart

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

#Caring #Vision #World

...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.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Christian #Thinking #Judging

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.
-- Katherine Paterson

#Fate