18 Quotes by Lois Duncan

People do not spring forth out of the blue, fully formed – they become themselves slowly, day by day, starting from babyhood. They are the result of both environment and heredity, and your fictional characters, in order to be believable, must be also.

Writers ‘get started’ the day they are born. The minds they bring into the world with them are the amazing machines their stories will come out of, and the more they feed into it, the richer those stories will be.

Girls like her are a dime a dozen, and I happen to have a pocket full of dimes.

The best things in life are simple. Simple things work. They don’t foul up. It’s the complicated things that get twisted around on you.

We are the wise. Do not envy us – We who are too wise to draw near the fire Lest we get burned; We who are too wise to love Lest love should vanish and we be hurt. We are the wise. Do not envy us our wisdom – We who are too wise to live Lest we should die.

I feel now as though I’ve been sitting all my life inside a box, and suddenly someone is lifting the lid and I can look up and see the stars.

By the time they’re in college, it’s gone too far. They’ve had twelve years without disciplined learning and they don’t know how to apply themselves. They haven’t learned to study or to pace their work so that projects get completed on time. They fall asleep in lectures because they expect to be entertained not educated.

The silence was gone now, and the night was filled with voices – a chirp, a growl, a twitter – a burst of high-pitched laughter.

Many of the kids coming into my classes at the university are all but illiterate. You give them a page to read and they can’t tell you what’s on it. Try teaching them the classics, and they can’t pronounce the words. Ask them to write about something, and they can’t make complete sentences – much less spell anything over two syllables.