268 Quotes by Katherine Paterson

The idea of living in the same house for all your childhood and having the same knot of devoted friends seemed magical to me, who had lived in thirteen different places by the time I was thirteen.

I ain’t got no blood claim on you, and the Lord in Heaven knows I want you to have a good life with your own people. But” – her huge bass voice broke up into little squeaky pieces – “but it’s killing me to see you go.

Words are humanity’s greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren’t cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.

Are you tired, Mary?” I asked. She raised her weary gaze to me. “My socks are tired,” she said. “And my shoes won’t even walk.” To this day whenever in our family we want to express complete exhaustion, we employ Mary’s eloquent description of her socks.

You think it’s so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain’t.

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 something?

She wasn’t scared of going deep, deep down in a world of no air and little light.

Sometimes you need to give people something that’s for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone – children, young people, adults – was: Read for your life.