Top 19 Quotes & Sayings by Deborah Wiles

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Deborah Wiles.
Last updated on October 1, 2024.
Deborah Wiles

Deborah Wiles is a children's book author. Her second novel, Each Little Bird That Sings, was a 2005 National Book Award finalist. Her documentary novel, Revolution, was a 2014 National Book Award finalist. Wiles received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship in 2004 and the E.B. White Read-Aloud Award in 2005. Her fiction centers on home, family, kinship, and community, and often deals with historical events, social justice issues, and childhood reactions to those events, as well as everyday childhood moments and mysteries, most taken directly from her childhood. She often says, "I take my personal narrative and turn it into story."

Open your arms to life! Let it strut into your heart in all its messy glory!
I am always telling students that a story is not just words. You can tell a story with dance or paint or music. Kids and adults are visual learners, auditory learners. There are those of us who need to touch it. Storytelling encompasses so much more than words on paper.
There's always something good to come out of disappointment: Comfort. — © Deborah Wiles
There's always something good to come out of disappointment: Comfort.
A story shared back and forth is just about the most perfect symbiotic gift. It's a bit like love. No, it's a lot like love.
I want young readers to know that to tell their own story is the most important thing they'll ever do.
I always say that I take my life and turn it into story, and I certainly did that with 'Countdown'.
As a children's author, you get to advocate for reading and writing in general, in a way an adult author might not be able to. It's a really interesting dance we do to get literature into the hands of young people and to help them to become literate and become readers; we want them to grow up reading and continue to do so when they're adults.
Telling stories with visuals is an ancient art. We've been drawing pictures on cave walls for centuries. It's like what they say about the perfect picture book. The art and the text stand alone, but together, they create something even better. Kids who need to can grab onto those graphic elements and find their way into the story.
I would lie in bed at night composing letters to Kennedy and Khrushchev, trying to convince them that they really didn't want to blow up the world. It seemed so simple to me that we just shouldn't hurt each other.
It's an extension of what I do also as part of making my living - I go into schools and work with kids on writing, and I do assembly programs often. Each one is different because each school has different requirements.
I loved everything about being ten, eleven, and twelve years old, and seem to make most of my heroines and heroes that age so I can reexperience all those pitfalls and wonderful discoveries. It helps me to figure out my own life when I write from that eleven year old place!
So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.
Baseball is an art! A drama! A ballet without music! Let us give it a Greek chorus!
There are always scary things happening in the world. There are always wonderful things happening. And it’s up to you to decide how you’re going to approach the world…how you’re going to live in it, and what you’re going to do.
Life is full of surprises, but the biggest one of all is learning what it takes to handle them.
A hero can be afraid, but a hero never runs away.
Never talk back to a teacher. Teachers are like God. Actually, teachers are God's boss.
The secret to not being afraid is to understand what scares you — © Deborah Wiles
The secret to not being afraid is to understand what scares you
I'm a goner, a kid who stays up half the night trying to figure out the horror of the world and trying to survive it.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!