268 Quotes by Katherine Paterson

Well, I’ve never been to a church before. It would be a new experience for me.” He went back to work. “You’d hate it.” “Why?” “It’s boring.

If you’re so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations- something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.

Jess tried going to Terabithia alone, but it was no good. It needed Leslie to make the magic.

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they’re not.

I had so looked forward to her walking.” Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. “Walk to Daddy,” Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the few steps across the space to her father’s chair.

If you’re a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you’re watching a lot. You’re trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.

We need a place, just for us. It could be so secret that we would never tell anyone in the whole world about it. It might be a whole secret country, and you and I could be the rulers of it.

On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm’s bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.