Quotes from Richard Peck

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you

I am here to help her learn, Tansy said, not to keep her from it.

Yes, I think you'll find that all the best teachers are old bats.

We write by the light of every book we've read.

At school we practiced for the Christmas program all month long. Miss Butler couldn't sing either, but she was a feisty director. . . . She took the Christmas program personally, as teachers do.

Then a lady flounced up and perched on the seat opposite. She had a full bird on the wing sewn to the crown of her hat, and she was painted up like a circus pony, so we took her to be from Chicago.

We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We'd heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there's enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We'd go to their fair, but we weren't going to drink their water.

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

Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds.

But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.

Aunt Agnes said, "It's hard to make a good Christian out of a cat.

Nobody a writer ever loved is dead.

The trenches are all filled in, but the boys are still dying.

Grandma saved herself a lot of bother by not being the kind of person you question.

It was always August.

Are all my memories true? Every word, and growing truer with the years.

Grandma's lie were more interesting, even historical.

What little we knew about grownups didn't seem to cover Grandma.

But just for a moment they were caught in the grip of this place. They felt the weight of its history, and mystery. So did I. The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you'd have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were. I wondered how quiet you'd have to be to hear the voices of those times.

Princes have far more toys than they need.

You were not cut out for a quiet life because you are honest to a fault. A man can want something to the point of indecency, he said, and when he attains his goal, it is ashes in his mouth and a bad conscience. The twentieth century did not look to be an age with any patience for the past.

Royal[s] can't manage on their own.

Even from a distance, he looked like somebody you didn't want to know better.

I was too young to know how much a dangerous man interests a good woman.