Katherine Paterson > Quotes

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

“It is not enough to simply teach children to read;
we have to give them something worth reading.
Something that will stretch their imaginations-
something that will help them make sense of their own lives
and encourage them to reach out toward people
whose lives are quite different from their own.”
― Katherine Paterson

“All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”
― Katherine Paterson

“It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength. ”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.”
― Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved

“It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king. He had thought that was it. Wasn't king the best you could be? Now it occurred to him that perhaps 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.)

Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn't there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

As for the terrors ahead—for he did not fool himself that they were all behind him—well, you just have to stand up to your fear and not let it squeeze you white. Right, Leslie?

Right.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.”
― Katherine Paterson, Preacher's Boy

“Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.”
― Katherine Paterson

“Shh," he said. "Look."
"Where?"
"Can't you see'um?" he whispered. "All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you."
"Me?"
"Shh, yes. There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arrving today might be the queen they've been waiting for.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?”
― Katherine Paterson

“If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?”
― Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I Loved

“You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Same Stuff as Stars

“We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story. And somehow, miraculously, a story that comes from deep in my heart calls from a reader that which is deepest in his or her heart, and together from our secret hidden selves we create a story that neither of us could have told alone.”
― Katherine Paterson

“It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.”
― Katherine Paterson, Puente Hasta Terabithia/Bridge To Terabithia

“Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.”
― Katherine Paterson

“Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.”
― Katherine Paterson

“We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Master Puppeteer

“...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.”
― Katherine Paterson, Preacher's Boy

“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 but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.”
― Katherine Paterson

“...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)”
― 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.”
― Katherine Paterson

“That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“Sometimes you have to favor your heel, even if it means you're hurting your toe.”
― Katherine Paterson

“Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her. Not the kind of silly stuff Ellie and Brenda giggled about on the telephone. This was too real and too deep to talk about, even to think about very much.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“I just can't get the poetry of the trees," he said.”
― Katherine Paterson

“Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.”
― Katherine Paterson

“. . . Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside himself like a pirate treasure. He was rich, very rich, but no one could know about it for now except his fellow outlaw, Julia Edmunds.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“What is man—and of course the writer means all of us puny little insignificant creatures—what is a mere human being that God who made the immense universe should ever notice?' She chuckled. 'The sky does take you down to size.'

Not even big as bugs. Not even a speck of dust to the nearest star,' Angel agreed.

But the psalmist answers his own question. "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor..." '

What?' Angel asked, not sure she had heard right.

A little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.'

The real angels? Do you believe that?'

Yes, Angel, I do. When people look down on me, and these days'—she laughed shortly—'these days everyone over the age of five does. When people look down on me, I remember that God looks at this pitiful, twisted old thing that I have become and crowns me with glory.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Same Stuff As Stars

“Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia

“On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.”
― Katherine Paterson, Preacher's Boy

“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.”
― Katherine Paterson

“Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart: More Thoughts on Reading and Writing Books for Children

“Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Flint Heart

“The moral, of course, is that you must always try to see other people's Point of View before you criticize anybody. Histories are crammed full of unkind things, silly things, and untrue things—why? Because so often the people who write them will not try to see or feel any Point of View but their own...So mind that you always look out for the Point of View and help people to see yours, too, if you want them to understand you.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Flint Heart

“Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Flint Heart

“Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.”
― Katherine Paterson, The Flint Heart

“Cows...weren't like people, with feelings of lonesomeness and worrying about what might happen next. That was just people, wasn't it? Sure, you could scare a cow, but wouldn't they get over it as soon as you let them be? They didn't stand around fretting about the next scare and the next and the next. ”
― Katherine Paterson, The Same Stuff as Stars

“Corre um boato por ai, que a linda menina que vem hoje, pode ser a rainha que eles estão esperando.”
― Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia