268 Quotes by Katherine Paterson

Civilization as well as education takes a downward spiral when it ceases to ask "What is truth?" and concerns itself primarily with what is measurable.

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

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

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

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

But I had never caused my parents "a minute's worry." Didn't they know that worry proves you care? Didn't they realize that I needed their worry to assure myself that I was worth something?

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.