268 Quotes by Katherine Paterson

To blame were two young radicals, a country bumpkin named Mao Tse-tung and a disillusioned intellectual by the name of Zhou En Lai. These two had had the nerve to ask the owners of the mills to install safety devices so that the children and old people who worked long hours would no longer in their weariness lose fingers and even hands in the machinery.

They decided they were too hooked on money and success, so they bought that old farm and they’re going to farm it and think about what’s important.

It’s like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part.

Mother put it like this: “Besides taking out my misplaced appendix, he put all my other insides just where they should have been.

I realize, of course, that I wasn’t born knowing how to read. I just can’t imagine a time when I didn’t know how.

It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it.

I suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books.

You have to believe it and you hate it. I don’t have to and I think it’s beautiful.