Quotes from Katherine Paterson

Civilization as well as education takes a downward spiral when it ceases to ask What is truth? and concerns itself primarily with what is measurable.

Corría como si para ella fuera algo natural. Recordó el vuelo de los patos salvajes en otoño. Igual de fluido y uniforme. Le vino a la cabeza la palabra «hermosa» pero la rechazó y apresuró el paso hacia casa.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied

I just can't get the poetry of the trees, he said.

My dad has to go to Washington to work, or we wouldn't have enough money . . .

The basic task of education is the care and feeding of the imagination.

For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan.

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.

If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

One of the young men she had just met had obviously paid for her ride. Her face was red when he came down the aisle. "I guess," he said, grinning, "if I pay your fare I can sit by you.

Then Jess gave himself over to the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from a corner of his brain.

Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.

Ain't no one ever told you yet? I recon I thought you've all figured out. - What? - That all this stuff about happy-endings is lies. The only ending in this world is death.

when I am in a foreign city and feel even the slightest bit disoriented, I can feel the panic of that day on the Hong Kong street begin to rise in my chest. My story of being lost ended quickly and happily, but it still haunts me.

Well, I've never been to a church before. It would be a new experience for me." He went back to work. "You'd hate it." "Why?" "It's boring.

Thinking about myself as a crazy, independent old woman made me feel almost happy.

Jess's feelings about Leslie's father poked up like a canker sore. You keep biting it, and it gets bigger and worse instead of better.

He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.

She looked at him as if she were going to argue, then seemed to change her mind. "It's crazy, isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy.

You save the whales and shoot the people, huh?

In February the weather sometimes gave us a vacation, in August, never. We just got up earlier every morning until finally we met ourselves going to bed.

It is a mysterious thing how cheerful people become in the face of disaster. My father whistled as he boarded up the windows, and my mother from time to time would call to him happily out the back door. She obviously was enjoying the unusual pleasure of having him home on a weekday morning. Tomorrow they might be ruined or dead, today they had each other.

Brenda burst in. "Do you know what some people do? They charge something and wear it, and then take it back and say it didn't fit or something. The stores don't give 'em no trouble." Her father turned in a kind of roar. "I never heard such a fool thing in my life. Didn't you hear your mother tell you to shut your mouth, girl!

It is the principle of the things, Jess. That is what you have got to understand. You have to stop people like that. Otherwise they run into tyrants and dictators.