"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)

"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)

"I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened."
— Katherine Paterson (Preacher's Boy)

"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

"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

"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

"...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)

"I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?"
— 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

"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)

"We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes."
— Katherine Paterson (The Master Puppeteer)

" '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)

"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)

"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)