Quotes from Katherine Paterson

You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.

Shh," he said. "Look." "Where?" "Can't you see'um?" he whispered. "All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you." "Me?" "Shh, yes. There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arrving today might be the queen they've been waiting for.

You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.

Just close your eyes and keep your mind wide open.

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

We need a place," she said, "just for us. It would be so secret that we would never tell anyone in the whole world about it." ... She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. "It might be a whole secret country," she continued, "and you and I would be the rulers of it.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else's life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn't been able to see before.

You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.

You're the proverbial diamond in the rough.

If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It's not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?

That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

a dream without a plan is just a wish

Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.

Fear is one thing. To let fear grab you and swing you around by the tail is another.

I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.