Quotes from Katherine Paterson

The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.

Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.

Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey.

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz--God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.

the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

If life is so bad, how come you're so happy?" "Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?

All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it too late to go back, she had left him stranded there - like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

Leslie named their secret land "Terabithia," and she loaned Jess all of her books about Narnia, so he would know how things went in a magic kingdom—how the animals and the trees must be protected and how a ruler must behave.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body.

How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life about him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry fossil upon the page?

life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough

Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

Don't tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don't need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you're after, my dear.

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

Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.

It was a three-dimensional nightmare version of some of his own drawings.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

Jess tried going to Terabithia alone, but it was no good. It needed Leslie to make the magic.

I will arise, he replied with dignity, when thou removes this fool dog off my gut.