Quotes from Jerry Spinelli

Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. 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!

Who are you?' I didn't understand the question. I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?' I gave him my name. 'Stopthief.

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.

Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

I am a mess. Like that MargieMocha, I am spilled across a floor, but there's nobody to mop me up. I have only one thing to show for the day: Perry Delloplane. The sound of a name. It is a grape in my mouth. I roll it over and over on my tongue--perrydelloplaneperrydelloplaneperrydelloplaneperrydelloplane--but when I try to crush it with my teeth, it slips away.

He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.' I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?' 'Inside.' It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.

And so I'm me again, Leo. Thanks to the example of a five-year-old. I'm hoping you wouldn't want it any other way. Not that you weren't flattered, right? I mean, to have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and self-respect - well, that's trophy enough for any guy's ego, huh?

And smiles to go before I weep, And Smiles to go before I weep.

And the trouble with bad times is, you can't sleep through them.

The echo of her laughter is the second sunrise I awaken to each day, and at night I feel it is more than the stars looking down on me.

She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.

His smile was so wide he'd have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway

I could feel a million reasons, but there were no words to express them.

Some nights, we were a city of two.

As we meandered, she said my name three times: Stargirl? Yes? That was better than TV. It was. Stargirl? Yes? Does the sun do that everyday? Yes. Stargirl? Yes? Everyday is sun day.

The blanket was there, but it was the boy's embrace that covered and warmed him.

Of course, all of their words for a thousand years could not fill the hole left by his mother, but they could raise a loving fence around it so he didn't keep falling in.

We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... We discovered the color of each other's eyes.

Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn's eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever. I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them.

I think of the flower in the bud: huddled, compressed, dark. Yet somehow it feels the night, knows moon from sun. It waits...waits.

Where were we? she said. Getting credit, I said. What about it? Well, it's nice to get credit. The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. Is it? she said.

I'm disappearing, Leo. Like Dootsie's trick, except this is real. Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore.

The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.

At the same time, we held back. Because she was different. Different. We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against.