Katherine Paterson Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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A work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

Katherine Paterson
Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire.

Katherine Paterson
It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

Katherine Paterson
February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.

Katherine Paterson
You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.

Katherine Paterson
The basic task of education is the care and feeding of the imagination.

Katherine Paterson
Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

Katherine Paterson
He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.

Katherine Paterson
Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.

Katherine Paterson
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

Katherine Paterson
You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.

Katherine Paterson
Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

Katherine Paterson
But to fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.

Katherine Paterson
Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.

Katherine Paterson
It was the kind of laughter that caught like briars in her chest and felt very much like pain.

Katherine Paterson
Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse — except August.

Katherine Paterson
We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds... We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.

Katherine Paterson
What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.

Katherine Paterson
Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

Katherine Paterson
I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

Katherine Paterson
Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.

Katherine Paterson
It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.

Katherine Paterson
If there was anything her short life had taught her, it was that a person must be tough. Otherwise, you were had.

Katherine Paterson
Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.

Katherine Paterson
Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Katherine Paterson
Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

Katherine Paterson
If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?

Katherine Paterson
I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Katherine Paterson
The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.

Katherine Paterson
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.

Katherine Paterson