Quotes from Sharon Creech

You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.

You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair.

Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out.

Don't judge a man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.

What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones.

In a course of a lifetime, what does it matter?

A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person.

Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears," Gram said. "If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you're dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don't have time to think about anything else. And if you've only got one or two, it's almost harder. You have room left over – empty spaces that you think you've got to fill up.

You never know the worth of water until the well is dry.

Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball.

I was wishing I was invisible. Outside, the leaves were falling to the ground, and I was infinitely sad, sad down to my bones. I was sad for Phoebe and her parents and Prudence and Mike, sad for the leaves that were dying, and sad for myself, for something I had lost.

Sometimes when you are trying not to think about something it keeps popping back in your head you can't help it you think about it and think about it and think about it until your brain feels like a squashed pea.

The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.

but it doesn't feel crazy to us. It feels like what we do.

I tried. Can't do it. Brain's empty.

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?

On that night after Phoebe had given her Pandora report, I thought about the Hope in Pandora's box. Maybe when everything seemed sad and miserable, Phoebe and I could both hope that something might start to go right.

And what did I think when I was small and why did I forget? And what else will I forget when I grow older? And if you forget is it as if it never happened? Will none of the things you saw or thought or dreamed matter?

Man needs bread and hyacinths: one to feed the body, and one to feed the soul.

Don't be in too much of a rush to be published. There is enormous value in listening and reading and writing—and then putting your words away for weeks or months–and then returning to your work to polish it some more.

when i reached the bottom, i finally understood what Guthrie meant when he shouted, "LIBERO!" It was a celebration of being alive

I wondered about Mrs. Winterbottom and what she meant about living a tiny life. If she didn't like all that baking and cleaning and jumping up to get bottles of nail polish remover and sewing hems, why did she do it? Why didn't she tell them to do some of the things themselves? Maybe she was afraid there would be nothing left for her to do. There would be no need for her and she would become invisible and no one would notice.