60 Quotes by Joseph Bruchac

There is a kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith’s best work, an understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda.

That story I loved so much as a child has become all too real to me now. But I’m not the boy in that old story who could run forever without tiring. I don’t have a bow and arrow. No weapons at all.

If it wasn’t for good,” my mother says, “we human beings would have been wiped out a long time ago. Either the monsters would have gotten us or we would have killed each other off with greed and jealousy and anger. So we have to believe in good. We have to look for the good in ourselves.

But I didn’t care. I just wanted to be close to them and feel their presence. I felt as if I were in there with them, looking out of their eyes, sharing their thoughts.

A year is plenty of time to fit in, right? Like a square peg is going to fit into a round hole if you just give it time? You could say that when I arrived here in the middle of my seventh-grade year I settled into a well-defined niche that was purely my own and remains so in eighth grade. The niche of a minuscule, mouthy Mohawk misfit. And nothing is going to change that.

She’s always suggesting books like a literary marriage broker, wedding readers to the titles just right for them.