Katherine Paterson Quotes

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

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

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.

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

I feel very silly saying to you, Tell me all about yourself, but I wish you would. I want to get to know you."
That's not how you get to know people. Don't you know? You can't talk it out, you've got to live into their lives, bad and good. You'll know me soon enough. What I want you to know.

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.

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.

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

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

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is - heavy, 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.