Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by Katherine Paterson
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Katherine Paterson.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.
If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?
I like to write about a lot of things, which is why my books are different. This is probably why I don't like to write sequels, but chiefly I like to write about people.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.
I can't believe there will ever be a time when the book is truly obsolete. It is the perfect technology and feeds the soul.
I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.
I'd like for the young people, and older ones, too, who don't count themselves as readers, to know the joy of reading and what it does to enrich your life in so many ways.
Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.
It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.
The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.
We do have trouble dealing with death, but it's the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.
I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.
I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.
If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.
Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up - and I always tell them, 'I hope they're real but I made them up.'
Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.
A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.
Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.
The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.
I'm a great believer in research. I have to know about a place before I write a story that is set in that place.
I realize, of course, that I wasn't born knowing how to read. I just can't imagine a time when I didn't know how.
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.
A dream without a plan is just a wish
I think, she began quietly, I think we want... not just bread for our bellies. We want more than only bread. We want food for our hearts, our souls. We want- how to say it? We want, you know- Puccini music.... we want for our beautiful children some beauty. She leaned over and kissed the curl on her finger. We want roses.
You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.
Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.
...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.
This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.
Lord, let me heed the angels you put in my path.
My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.
A library is a feast to which we are all invited.
I am called to listen to the sound of my own heart -- to write the story within myself that demands to be told at that particular point in my life. And if I do this faithfully, clothing that idea in the flesh of human experience and setting it in a true place, the sound from my heart will resound in the reader's heart.
Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.
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.
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.
A good story is alive, ever changing and growing as it meets each listener or reader in a spirited and unique encounter, while the moralistic tale is not only dead on arrival, it's already been embalmed. It's safer that way. When a lively story goes dancing out to meet the imagination of a child, the teller loses control over meaning. The child gets to decide what the story means.
It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.
Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.
I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?
Youth is a mortal wound.
A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.
I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.
Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
Once a book is published, it no longer belongs to me. My creative task is done. The work now belongs to the creative mind of my readers. I had my turn to make of it what I would, now it is their turn.
The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.
It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.
To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.
As much pleasure as young people get from Twittering and texting, there is no way these activities will nourish their minds and spirits the way literature can.
Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.
When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget. [...] So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.
There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do.
The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.
As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.
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.
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