Quotes from Jerry Spinelli

You're really dumb, she whispered in my ear. Yeah? Yeah. Why do you think there're eighteen pebbles in my wagon? And then the last remaining space between our lips was gone and I was falling headlong into her eyes, right there on Palo Verde after dinner. And I can tell you, that was no saint kissing me.

He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird... He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it's pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there.

It was like the panting of a thousand puppies.

When you're inside your own story, you don't see things like a reader. You don't see your life in tidy paragraphs and chapters.

I loved his goatee even more than his mustache. It was so soft and white. I wanted to rub my face in it. I wanted to climb inside it and live there and peek out.

There was a sense that things - words, feelings, laughs - were forever brawling inside her to be the first one out. Now, beside me, I sensed... emptiness. Emptiness in such a person is not nothing, is not small. It is enormous. -Cammie

It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against.

We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past 'weird' and 'strange' and 'goofy'. her ways knocked us off balance.

She had been utterly pleased with herself. "I runned away!" she chirped, and the sun was no match for her smile. And Zinkoff saw in that moment something that he had no words for. He saw that a kid runs to be found and jumps to be caught. That's what being a kid is: found, caught." (p. 185).

Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!

What's the matter? said the old man. Can't you make up your mind what kind you want? The kid laughed. I want them all. He threw his hands out. I'm learning everything! He opened one of the books. Look...geometry...triangles...

When's the next star party? Spring Spring. Long time to wait. The sky's not going anywhere.

I love beginnings. If I were in charge of calendars, every day would be January 1. And

He just did it for the same reason he does everything else - he felt like it.

But its coolness lies beneath its looks.

What she saw, she felt. Her eyes went straight to her heart. The old man on the bench, for example, made her cry. The lumberjack ants made her laugh. The door of many colours put her in such a snit of curiosity that i had to drag her away;she felt she could not proceed with her life until she knocked on such a door.

When you're nothing, you're free to believe anything.

Let's promise to each other that if we ever meet again we will never plow and push our new-fallen snow. We will not become slush. We will stay like this field and melt away together only in the sun's good time.

I'm pounding and kicking him and I'm all me and I'm kicking and kicking into the face that's crying and begging for mercy, kicking, kicking...only for real, for cold ice real, it's not my foot smashing his face to a pulp, but my stick smashing the puck into the board, and it's not him crying, but me.

Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others'?

Tanks rolled up the boulevard four by four and the sky shook on its hinges

You're amazing,' he would say, and I would feel like a buttercream with a hazelnut heart

Their voices came in clearly from the golf course. The laughing and yelping made a raucous counterpoint to the metronomic tock-tock-tock of the bunny's never-ending hop. Once, in the light of the quarter moon, they appeared in silhouette on a domed, distant green, like figures dancing in someone's dream. And then quite suddenly they were gone, as if the dreamer had awakened. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. Someone called Hey! after them, but that was all.

If you believe it, it happens. If you don't, it doesn't. When you believe him, you put your own power in his hands.