Katherine Paterson Quotes
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?
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.
Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.
The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.
What I have come to believe is that joy is the twin sister of gratitude. I am most joyful when I am most grateful.
There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.
You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.
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.
If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?
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.
I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.
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.
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.
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.
Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.
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.
We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.
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.
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.
Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied
The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.
It's crazy isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy.
The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.
You're the proverbial diamond in the rough", she'd said to him once, touching his nose lightly with the tip of her electrifying finger.
Fear is one thing. To let fear grab you and swing you around by the tail is another.
