Quotes by Katherine Paterson

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

You think its so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it aint.

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.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

You never know ahead of time what somethings really going to be like.

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.

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.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You dont have to be ashamed.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

life aint supposed to be nothing, cept maybe tough

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didnt want to forget... So I realize, that if its hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

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 Cramms bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

Its crazy isnt it? She shook her head. You have to believe it, but you hate it. I dont have to believe it, and I think its beautiful. She shook her head again. Its crazy.

She wasnt scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light