Quotes from Katherine Paterson

We are not wise enough, we adults, to know what book will be right for any child at any particular moment, but the richer the book, the more imaginative, the more emotionally true, the more beautiful the language, the better the chance that it will minister to a child's deep, inarticulate fears.

The Womeldorf family loved music, and one of Daddy's happiest memories was of the day his father came home from town bearing a morning glory horn Edison phonograph with round cylinder records. "How on earth could that contraption sing and play lovely music?" he remembered marveling. The family considered it the wonder of the age and loved listening to it.

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.

a frightening number of whom had IQ scores in the low 70s? I stopped reading and just stuck the records out of sight in a bottom drawer of my desk, and never thought of them again until the end of the year when I was throwing away the accumulation of papers in my desk. I was furious with those scores. My kids were not dumb! I've never trusted standardized tests since.

He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name—John Goetchius—but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.

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

One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn't finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason.

Once there, the chaplain closed the door and threw his arms around her. Alarmed, she jammed the heel of her pump into his foot. He let go with a howl and she fled. The incident was never spoken of again until she had daughters of her own. I can remember at about thirteen staring wide-eyed at my proper mother when she thought it time to tell me this cautionary tale.

there was one path across Boston Commons that a young man must not ask a young woman to take unless he meant business. Which path was that? she asked Holmes. "Ah," she remembered the elderly doctor saying, "if I were only fifty years younger I would show you.

one day when I was changing her diapers she took my hand and put it on her tummy, so I tickled her. My reward was her first smile.

I got up the nerve to ask her if she remembered that first visit and my terrible faux pas. She pretended, in true Japanese fashion, that it had never happened.

Whenever I am tempted to dismiss the poor or uneducated for their vulgar tastes, I see the face of old Auntie Braxton, as she stands stock still in front of our picket fence, lips parted to reveal her almost toothless gums, drinking in a polonaise as though it were heavenly nourishment.

Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on. For hadn't Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world - huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile? (Handle with care - everything - even the predators.)

For the first few seconds, Jess kicked and struggled against the strong arms. Then Jess gave himself over the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from the corner of his brain. - Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson

Listening to that woman was like licking melted ice cream off the carton.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

We do have trouble dealing with death, but it's the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.

Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

The children's book world has given me wonderful friendships and an unbelievably rich life.

We book people are always preaching about reading aloud to children, but unless you do, you can't realize how it enriches family life.

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.