347 Quotes by Jerry Spinelli

She dreams a lot. She dreams of Ondines and falling maidens and houses burning in the night. But search her dreams all you like and you’ll never find Prince Charming. No knight on a white horse gallops into her dreams to carry her away. When she dreams of love, she dreams of smashed potatoes.

Events become feelings, feelings become events.

He said he would try, but I guess he never got the chance. About the last thing I remember him saying was “Don’t worry so much about it. It’s not the sneakers that count, it’s the feet.

For hours I lay under my sheet of moonlight. Her voice came through the night, from the light, from the stars.

Because life doesn’t always happen according to a timetable or calendar. And feelings can’t be scheduled.

Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn’s eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever. I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them.

When you’re inside your own story, you don’t see things like a reader. You don’t see your life in tidy paragraphs and chapters.

Vowels were something else. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn’t tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.

It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against. For ourselves. For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long.