Jerry Spinelli Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life

Jerry Spinelli
His smile was so wide he'd have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway

Jerry Spinelli
Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore.

Jerry Spinelli
She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.

Jerry Spinelli
Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of.

Jerry Spinelli
I felt alone on the planet, drifting through the cosmos. With both hands I reached out to the night. There was no answer. Or maybe I just couldn't hear it.

Jerry Spinelli
Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.

Jerry Spinelli
It was different with you, Leo. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same.

Jerry Spinelli
Many girls have been romanced under the moon, and I don't mean to say moonlight is overrated, but few I think have known the magic of a sunrise kiss.

Jerry Spinelli
He said even if it's too cloudy to see, the sun will still rise, it will still be there. "But that's the whole point," I said. "Seeing it." "Is it?" he said.

Jerry Spinelli
Angels and crows passed each other, one leaving, the other coming.

Jerry Spinelli
I am a mess. Like that MargieMocha, I am spilled across a floor, but there's nobody to mop me up. I have only one thing to show for the day: Perry Delloplane. The sound of a name. It is a grape in my mouth. I roll it over and over on my tongue—perrydelloplaneperrydelloplaneperrydelloplaneperrydelloplane—but when I try to crush it with my teeth, it slips away.

Jerry Spinelli
Who are you?' I didn't understand the question. I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?' I gave him my name. 'Stopthief.

Jerry Spinelli
Do not follow me! Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tommorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!

Jerry Spinelli
The blanket was there, but it was the boy's embrace that covered and warmed him.

Jerry Spinelli
Ironic," Betty Lou said at last. "The cereus insists on sunlight—that's why it must be at the end of the yard. And yet it saves its flowers for the moon. The sun never sees what it fathers." It takes from the day," I said, "gives to the night.

Jerry Spinelli
I'm erased. I'm gone. I'm nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl…. And… I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I'm not outside my world anymore, and I'm not really inside it either. The thing is, there's no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.

Jerry Spinelli
Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters. "I hate change," she said. "It's so... jangly." "Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?" I said. "Did you ever see a little kid's face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?

Jerry Spinelli
She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.

Jerry Spinelli
A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?

Jerry Spinelli
We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... We discovered the color of each other's eyes.

Jerry Spinelli
You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people.

Jerry Spinelli
I think of the flower in the bud: huddled, compressed, dark. Yet somehow it feels the night, knows moon from sun. It waits...waits.

Jerry Spinelli
The golden rule of writing is to write what you care about. If you care about your topic, you'll do your best writing, and then you stand the best chance of really touching a reader in some way.

Jerry Spinelli
You occupied my space. But because you were not in my present, when I looked into my future I saw... nothing. Isn't that sad? And stupid?

Jerry Spinelli
I have to tell you I love living in a world without clocks. The shackles are gone. I'm a puppy unleashed in a meadow of time. — Stargirl

Jerry Spinelli
Nobody knows who said it first, but somebody must have: 'Kid's gotta be a maniac.

Jerry Spinelli
If we are destined to be together again, be happy to know you'll be getting the real me, not some blubbering half me.

Jerry Spinelli
Tell me I didn't imagine it, Leo. Tell me that even though our bodies were in seperate states, our star selves shared an enchanted place. Tell me that right around noon today (eastern time) you had the strangest sensation: a tiny chill on your shoulder...a flutter in the heart...a shadow of strawberry-banana crossing your tongue...tell me you whispered my name.

Jerry Spinelli
I listen to the summer symphony outside my window. Truthfully, it's not a symphony at all. There's no tune, no melody, only the same notes over and over. Chirps and tweets and trills and burples. It's as if the insect orchestra is forever tuning its instruments, forever waiting for the maestro to tap his baton and bring them to order. I, for one, hope the maestro never comes. I love the music mess of it.

Jerry Spinelli