Quotes from Kate DiCamillo

Farewell" is not the word that you would like to hear from your mother as you are being led to the dungeon by 2 oversize mice in black hoods. Words that you would like to hear are "Take me instead, I will go to the dungeon in my sons place." There is a great deal of comfort in those words.

The world is dark, and light is precious.

Flora's heart, the lonely, many-armed squid of it, flipped and flailed inside her.

The words were good words, Ulysses felt, maybe even great words, but the list was very incomplete. He was just getting started. The words needed to be arranged, fussed with, put in the order of his heart.

He let the light from the upstairs world enter him and fill him. He gasped aloud with the wonder of it.

We shall all, in the end, be led to where we belong. We shall all, in the end, find our way home.

Sometimes, it seemed like everybody in the world was lonely. I thought about my mama. Thinking about her was the same as the hole you keep on feeling with your tongue after you lose a tooth. Time after time, my mind kept going to that empty spot, the spot where i felt like she should be.

There was something scary about watching adults sleep. It was as if no one at all were in charge of the world.

Reader, do you believe that there is such a thing as happily ever after? Or, like Despereaux, have you, too, begun to question the possibility of happy endings?

Nothing is more terrifying to evil than joy.

At least Lester had the decency to weep at his act of perfidy. Reader, do you know what 'perfidy' means? I have a feeling you do, based on the scene that unfolded here. But you should look up the word in your dictionary, just to be sure.

Go ahead, Marlene, thought Edward. Push me around. Do with me as you will. What does it matter? I am broken. Broken.

If you want to be a writer, write a little bit every day. Pay attention to the world around you. Stories are hiding, waiting everywhere. You just have to open your eyes and your heart.

Farewell is a word that, in any language, is full of sorrow. It is a word that promises nothing.

The sound of the king's music made Despereaux's soul grow large and light inside of him.

Sometimes he reminded me of a turtle hiding inside its shell, in there thinking about things and not ever sticking his head out into the world.

And this is a time to act, not wonder.

She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head. You're going to vacuum up that squirrel! There is just no predicting what kind of sentences you might say, thought Flora. For instance, who would ever think you would shout, You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!?

We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it? The world cannot be changed, said Gloria. The world is what the world is and has forever been. No, said Leo Matienne softly, I will not believe that. For here is Peter standing before us, asking us to make it something different.

But that is impossible, said Peter. Magic is always impossible, said the magician. It begins with the impossible and ends with the impossible and is impossible in between. That is why it is magic.

Are you a man or a mouse?

It's not even that I bump into things. It's more that things leap out of nowhere and bump into me

There ain't no way you can hold on to something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.

Yes, ma'am. He figured the world was a sorry affair and that it had enough ugly things in it and what he was going to do was concentrate on putting something sweet in it.