Quotes from Jerry Spinelli

Like so many of Archie's words, they seemed not to enter through my ears but to settle on my skin, there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and I at last would understand.

She wasn't gorgeous, wasn't ugly. A sprinkle of freckles crossed the bridge of her nose. Mostly, she looked like a hundred other girls in school, except for two things, She wore no makeup, and her eyes were the biggest I had ever seen, like deer's eyes caught in headlights.

I mean if she's real, she's in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who's really like that is going to last around here?

To Zinkoff and to all the kids in this brick-and-hoagie town, summer is like a great warm shallow lake. Some frolic and splash. Some strike out for the distant shore, too far away to see. Some just stand there, digging their toes into the sandy bottom. It is warm and sunny and lazy and you can leave your feet if you want to, because in the warm waters of summer, everybody floats." (p. 161).

I'm not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn, I outgrow it, I change it.

Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?

I was feeling nine ways at once, and they all ended up at the touch of her hand on my ear...

Enchanted places cannot be created, they can only be discovered.

Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow.

chewed time like a wad of bubble gum and stretched it across the darkness all the way to dawn, when the light at the edge of my window told me I was too late to greet the sunrise.

I took one step onto the field and stopped. What was I doing? The pure whiteness, dazzling in the sun, was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Who was I to spoil it? Snow falls. Earth says: Here—a gift for you. And what do we do? We shovel it. Blow it. Scrape it. Plow it. Get it out of our way. We push it to our fringes. Is there anything uglier or sadder than a ten-day-old snow dump? It's not even snow anymore. It's slush.

And I think every once in a while someone comes along who is a little more primitive than the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a little more in touch with the stuff we're made of.

You're a kid trying to figure out the world you were born into, that's all.

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.

But those pictures and those moments are posed and smiling. They're not as real as this.

OK, so you're not perfect. Who is?

She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the fanciest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl.

And there was more to her seeing than that. What she saw, she felt. Her eyes went straight to her heart.

I resolved that if I was ever in a war, I would be a dumb nonspy.

She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds, we tried to pin her to a cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.

They stood staring at each other's face, the only place their eyes were safe.

Emptiness in such a person is not nothing, is not small. It is enormous.

Some people are saying she's some kind of alien sent down here from Alpha Centauri or something

Good Boy: Just because he doesn't get into trouble doesn't mean he doesn't appreciate trouble.