Top 29 Quotes & Sayings by Richard Peck

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

Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.

...they'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they?...Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.

Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.

Grandma, how old is she?" "Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.

Because nobody but a reader ever became a writer.

We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.

Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood.

Read to your children Twenty minutes a day; You have the time, And so do they. Read while the laundry is in the machine; Read while the dinner cooks; Tuck a child in the crook of your arm And reach for the library books. Hide the remote, Let the computer games cool, For one day your children will be off to school; Remedial? Gifted? You have the choice; Let them hear their first tales In the sound of your voice. Read in the morning; Read over noon; Read by the light of Goodnight Moon. Turn the pages together, Sitting close as you'll fit, Till a small voice beside you says, "Hey, don't quit.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

September 11 We thought we'd outdistanced history Told our children it was nowhere near; Even when history struck Columbine, It didn't happen here. We took down the maps in the classroom, And when they were safely furled, We told the young what they wanted to hear, That they were immune from a menacing world. But history isn't a folded-up map, Or an unread textbook tome; Now we know history's a fireman's child Waiting at home alone.

If you're going to read minds, start with a simple one.

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

I read.. because one life is not enough

Only the nonreader fears books.

This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.

I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.

But put two librarians' heads together, and mountains move.

I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready

Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.

I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.

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

Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.

We write by the light of every story we have ever read.

When I read a good book, it's like traveling the world without ever leaving my chair.

That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.