Quotes from Richard Peck

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.

Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

Besdies, to turn me ladylike might have rendered me useless and possibly ornamental.

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand---how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.

She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.

Blue lightning flashed in the kitchen, and for a split second you could see every calendar on the wall in there. Than an almighty explosion like the crack of doom. She'd rolled a cherry bomb across the floor, and it went off right under the eight feet of the Cowgill brothers, the three big bruisers and Ernie.

Why she hankered to be a teacher, I couldn't tell you. But she had chalk dust in her veins, and she deserved to get that certificate. It was only fair.

We'd gotten him wrong. He wasn't a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he'd seen us all a good deal clearer than we'd ever seen him.

Conformity is the enemy of friendship

A solider must leave someone behind,' she said. 'What men do best is walk away from women. Wars are handy for that.

Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.

And don't look for anything out of the law around here," she said. "The Cowgills and the Leapers is kin to the sheriff. No justice in these parts. It's every man for hisself." "But as the saying goes, if you can't get justice," Mrs. Dowdel remarked, "get even.

And I'll tell you something else for free. If you set a foot over that doorsill, I'll wring your red neck.

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the pages of a book I can be anybody

Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.

The sobs came then, faster than she could swallow. A teacher dares not cry, not a real teacher.

But it was a rich, picture-perfect, it-can't-happen-here kind of suburb where people had gone, not to deal with life's problems, but to avoid them.

We thought he was weird. He thought we were weird. It was great. It was what multiculturalism ought to be -Archer

The trenches are all filled in, but the boys are still dying.' Then I could read her thoughts and I knew what this day meant. Mrs. Abernathy's son could have been my dad.

A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.

So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.