Katherine Paterson

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.

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

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.

life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough

My heart is heavy, she thought. It__ not just a saying. It is what is__eavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way.

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

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

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else__ 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__ been able to see before.

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

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

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

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.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

I love revisions_We can__ go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

Hope ... is not a feeling it is something you do.

Fear is one thing. To let fear grab you and swing you around by the tail is another.