Top 317 Quotes & Sayings by Kate DiCamillo - Page 2

It's a very powerful, emotional thing to read a book, and to reduce it to a series of questions in a test strips something away from the book.

I was a shy, terrified kid. But I was also a kid who was lucky enough to have friends. I laughed with those friends. I had adventures. We dreamed together. I relied on them.

In a first draft, I concentrate on moving forward and trying not to panic.

I think that sometimes we open our hearts a little more easily to animals than we do to each other.

If you sit down and read with your kid, either having your child read to you or you reading to your child at a regular time each day, it deepens the relationship. You don't have to talk about stuff; the story will do that work for you.

Writing at home and then going out into the world to talk about why books matter to me feeds the writing. It's a good mix. It provides balance.

I always have a notebook with me, I eavesdrop; I write down what people say. It's very rare that one of those things will provoke a story, but I think that that kind of paying attention all the time, and keeping everything open, lets the stories come in. But where they come from is still a mystery to me.

I actually participated in a Little Miss Orange Blossom Contest when was I was seven or eight years old. I remember standing up on the stage and thinking, 'Oh boy, I should not be here.' Obviously, I didn't win.

It's such a potent thing, to be a kid. We grow up, and we don't want to remember how everything is so beautiful and terrifying when we're young. The older you get, the more you hope to muffle things.

How do you make your kids read more? It needs to be presented as a joy and a privilege to get to do it, and the kids should get to see you as a parent reading for your own pleasure. It's not something you send your kids off to do, 'Go into your room and read for 15 minutes or else.' It becomes a task then.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn't writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

Progress is hard to measure in any creative endeavor, I think. It's often a matter of instinct, of feeling your way through what works and what doesn't.

There's still, even now, a part of me that can't believe that I got published. That part of me has never gone away.

It wasn't until my fifth or sixth book where I realized I'm trying to do the same thing in every story I tell, which is bring everybody together in the same room.

I find that when I write for children, I am more hopeful, less cynical. I don't use different words or a different sentence structure. I just hope more.

How do I feel when I look back at prior work? Hmmm. I think, 'I tried to do the best I could do. It's not perfect. It will never be perfect.' And then I think, 'I want to try again.'

Everybody reading the same book at the same time pulls people together. It does start a conversation. If you're going to read 'The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane,' you're going to talk about heartbreak and loss and all of those things that people don't talk about as a community.

Whenever I am with a group of kids, I always ask them, 'How many of you know about the summer reading program at your library and how many of you know it's free?' Spreading that sort of message comes very naturally to me.

Whether it is fear of having fish pie or staying in someone's house or not being able to tell the time, all of those things I can remember very clearly. We so often forget how big all these things are for very small children because they are so often trying these things for the first time.

There's this amplification that happens anytime you tell a story. You let it go out into the world. It's the most beautiful thing. All I can do is look at it in wonder and amazement.

If you read, the world is your oyster. It truly is. Reading makes everything possible.

I can never tell if anything I do is really good. I'm always just slightly chagrined.

Look at me, he said to her. His arms and legs jerked. Look at me. You got your wish. I have learned how to love. And it’s a terrible thing. I’m broken. My heart is broken. Help me. The old woman turned and hobbled away. Come back, thought Edward. Fix me

We must ask ourselves these questions as often as we dare. How will the world change if we do not question it?

The undoing is almost always more difficult than the doing.

I grew up in Florida, and I wanted to go home and I couldn't. I didn't have the money. The book [The Tiger Rising] was a way to go home.

You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope. You must wonder who will love you, whom you will love next.

Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.

And so he was reading the story as if it were a spell and the words of it, spoken aloud, could make magic happen.

The world is dark, and light is precious. Come closer, dear reader. You must trust me. I am telling you a story.

Writing is seeing. It is paying attention.

Each new friendship can make you a new person, because it opens up new doors inside of you.

A typical day for me is I get up at 6:00, the coffeemaker goes on automatically and the computer gets turned on. I pour a cup of coffee, listen to Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, and then I write.

We forget that the simple gesture of putting a book in someone's hands can change a life. I want to remind you that it can. I want to thank you because it did. - 2010 Indies Choice Award

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

... every time you look at the world and the people in it closely, lovingly, imaginatively, it changes you. The world, under the microscope of your attention, opens up like a beautiful, strange flower and gives itself back to you in ways you could never imagine.

There is nothing sweeter in this sad world than the sound of someone you love calling your name.

Reading is my passion.

When we read together, we connect. Together, we see the world. Together, we see one another.

Go home and read to your adult. We forget how much we love to be read to.

You can't always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.

Once upon a time," he said out loud to the darkness. He said these words because they were the best, the most powerful words that he knew and just the saying of them comforted him.

I feel like I've been blessed. I see the world through stories.

There ain't a body, be it mouse or man, that ain't made better by a little soup.

That is surely the truth, at least for now. But perhaps you have not noticed: the truth is forever changing.

Life is hard. Life is beautiful. Life is difficult. Life is wonderful.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane began with a friend giving me a rabbit doll - forgive me, Edward, for using that word; he doesn't like "doll" - for Christmas. I said, "Oh, he's lovely, what's his name?" And she said, "Edward." And a few days after I received the rabbit, who was dressed very handsomely in Edwardian kind of clothes, I saw him stripped of his finery and face down on the bottom of the ocean floor. Why? I don't know. But that's where his story began in my head.

But, reader, there is no comfort in the word "farewell," even if you say it in French. "Farewell" is a word that,in any language, is full of sorrow. It is a word that promises absolutely nothing.

If you have no intention of loving or being loved, the whole journey is pointless.

My favorite six letter word is always because it promises so much. My favorite five letter word is never because it insists on contradicting the promise. My favorite four letter word is once because it says it happened then. My favorite three letter word is yes because I’m just now learning to say it to my heart. My favorite two letter word is if because it makes all things possible like this: If not always If not never Then once. Yes.

It is important that you say what you mean to say. Time is too short. You must speak the words that matter.

It is truly excellent to have someone believe in you and your ability to write. But I think it is just as helpful to have people who don't believe in you, people who mock you, people who doubt you, people who enrage you. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of this type of person in the world ... write for yourself. Write for the story. And write, also, for all of the people who doubt you. Write for all those people who are not brave enough to do this grand and wondrous thing themselves. Let them motivate you.

We appreciate the complicated and wonderful gifts you give us in each other. And we appreciate the task you put down before us, of loving each other the best we can, even as you love us.

And hope is like love...a ridiculous, wonderful, powerful thing.

Fairy tales dont tell you that dragons are real, but that they can be defeated!

Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light.

You can always trust a dog that likes peanut butter.

There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.

Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark.

So many miracles have not yet happened.