T. J. Perkins Quotes

I do love that discovery of when you're trying to figure out how to make something work, and it happens in a way that you didn't predict.

It would look like a notebook with dividers, and there'd be different subjects and things [preschoolers] could do, so that they could feel like they were going to school also.

We had a dog, Lucky, who was fourteen years old. For the last year of his life, I would take him on these walks that were long but didn't cover much distance.

With most of my books, there are some parts that pop up right away, and other parts I have to wait for.

Ideas mostly come from the work itself. Often when I'm drawing, the words will be bouncing around in my head, and when I'm writing, ideas about the drawing happen.

I don't like things to be static when I'm working.

I do like to be surprised.

I'm structured with time.

I started thinking about [ what book is going to go next] when I was working on As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth.

I know if I did that [career as painter] all the time I would get tired of it.

If I could make a career out of drawing little girls hiding in corners, I would do really well.

I made a drawing for a book I'm working . It's a little drawing of a girl who's ashamed and upset and hides in the corner of the closet. It's the kind of drawing that I feel like I'm really good at.

I love that when you're writing your mind is sort of figuring things out on its own, without you directing it.

I don't want to make myself sound that spontaneous, because I'm not.

One of my favorite moments in that book [As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth] was when something happened that I had no idea was going to happen.

I'm heavily influenced by Edward Ardizzone, how he has people talking in little speech bubbles. I love those. And also Edward Gorey. Those are two of my favorite people.

Good humor pokes fun at the powerful — not the weak.

We adults all stay sixteen or so in some corner of the soul.

Research is always a high priority in my fiction. Songs, fashion, politics, television, movies, trends - I try to get those details right.

I hope and pray that despite an unhealed past full of atrocities and deep divisions in the present, God can and will make "the distant near" and a "brother of the stranger" in America's future.

There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

If you have a chance to see Children Of War, you can watch expert trauma counselors try to help bring healing to young people who have experienced atrocities in conflict.

I grew up hard. I picked cotton and plowed with the mule and fixed the cars and played with the guitar and the piano.

I play any piano with a good tune.

I didn’t have much school. Three years.

I was going for the idea that a time can also be a location. You can revisit a time of year, in the same way you can go back to a house that you used to live in.

Being 'one flesh' in marriage means that the relationship is not the source of security, affirmation, control, or value. Those issues of identity need to be rooted in Christ.

There are some people in life that you can't get over.

I know you aren't perfect. But it's a person's imperfections that make them perfect for someone else.

I've always thought the best relationships are those that are as happy and content in silence as they are in action [...]

Umbrellas are so small and sad and easy to forget.

It's ridiculous how difficult a question can be when the answer means so much.

Why is it that the right people never wind up together? Why are people so afraid to leave a relationship, even if they know it's a bad one?

I'm not interested in making what's easy. I'm interested in making what's beautiful.

Perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring." I smile. "You don't think I'm perfect?" "No. You're delightfully screwy, and I wouldn't have you any other way.

Boys turns girls into such idiots.

How could I have ever for a moment believed I wasn't in love with him?

My smile wavers as I revert to my natural state of being: nervous and weird.

I am hard on myself. But isn't it better to be honest about these things before someone else can use them against you? Before someone else can break your heart? Isn't it better to break it yourself?

You read a lot. - Safer than going on a real adventure

I don’t understand why things always go from perfect to weird with us. It’s like we’re incapable of normal human interaction.

Foreign novels are less action-oriented. They have a different pace; they’re more reflective. They challenge us to look for the story, find the story within the story.

I wish the world would swallow us here, whole, in this moment. And that's when it hits me that this - this - is falling in love.

What’d I tell you about musicians? That bad boy type will only break your heart.

What my parents never considered is that I just wanted a choice.

Communism...muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I look at you, and I think about you, and ... I don't know. No one has ever confounded me the way you do.

Yes, St. Claire. I like you. But I can't say it aloud, because he's my friend. And friends don't let other friends make drunken declarations and expect them to act upon them the next day

It's become impossible to deny he means something to me.