Top 160 Jerry Spinelli Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Angels and crows passed each other, one leaving, the other coming.”

— Jerry Spinelli

52. “He tapped my chest. ‘Happy is here.’ He tapped his own chest. ‘Here.’ I looked down past my chin. ‘Inside?’ ‘Inside.’ It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.”

— Jerry Spinelli

53. “We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past “weird” and “strange” and “goofy.” Her ways knocked us off balance.”

— Jerry Spinelli

54. “Because that’s what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he’s the first person you think of.”

— Jerry Spinelli

55. “You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.”

— Jerry Spinelli

56. “Inside his house, a kid gets one name, but on the other side of the door, it’s whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.”

— Jerry Spinelli

57. “For the life of him, he couldn’t figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.”

— Jerry Spinelli

58. “I didn’t realize we were being watched. We were all being watched.”

— Jerry Spinelli

59. “Of course, all of their words for a thousand years could not fill the hole left by his mother, but they could raise a loving fence around it so he didn’t keep falling in.”

— Jerry Spinelli

60. “Be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.”

— Jerry Spinelli

61. “He said even if it’s too cloudy to see, the sun will still rise, it will still be there. “But that’s the whole point,” I said. “Seeing it.” “Is it?” he said.”

— Jerry Spinelli

62. “Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other’s house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other’s parents. You can’t pry them apart.”

— Jerry Spinelli

63. “Enchanted places cannot be created, they can only be discovered.”

— Jerry Spinelli

64. “What she saw, she felt. Her eyes went straight to her heart.”

— Jerry Spinelli

65. “You’re amazing,′ he would say, and I would feel like a buttercream with a hazelnut heart.”

— Jerry Spinelli

66. “I feel like I’m playing chess underwater. The pieces keep floating away. I don’t know where things are. I can’t figure out tomorrow.”

— Jerry Spinelli

67. “And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side...”

— Jerry Spinelli

68. “The trouble with miracles is, they don’t last long. And the trouble with bad times is, you can’t sleep through them.”

— Jerry Spinelli

69. “Friendship isn’t always sunnyside up.”

— Jerry Spinelli

70. “Someday in the far future, when the Milky Way has turned another cosmic click, will someone carry a chair to your grave site and keep you company forever? Can you imagine someone loving you that much?”

— Jerry Spinelli

71. “A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first?”

— Jerry Spinelli

72. “In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.”

— Jerry Spinelli

73. “She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.”

— Jerry Spinelli

74. “Some nights, we were a city of two.”

— Jerry Spinelli

75. “I felt alone on the planet, drifting through the cosmos. With both hands I reached out to the night. There was no answer. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear it.”

— Jerry Spinelli

76. “Like so many of Archie’s words, they seemed not to enter through my ears but to settle on my skin, there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and I at last would understand.”

— Jerry Spinelli

77. “I’ll still be missing you as much as ever. I’l still smile at the memory of you. I’ll still be – Okay, I’ll say it again – loving you, but I won’t abandon myseld for you. I cannot be faithful to you without being faithful to myself.”

— Jerry Spinelli

78. “She might be pointing to a doorway, or a person, or the sky. But such things were so common to my eyes, so undistinguished, that they would register as “nothing” I walked in a gray world of nothing.”

— Jerry Spinelli

79. “Stargirl began to improvise. She flung her arms to a make-believe crowd like a celebrity on parade. She waggled her fingers at the stars. She churned her fists like an egg-beater. Every action echoed down the line behind her. The three hops of the bunny became three struts of a vaudeville vamp. Then a penguin waddle. Then tippy-toed priss. Every new move brought new laughter from the line.”

— Jerry Spinelli

80. “Life is populated with scarecrows – all those people and things that seem so scary and trouble our sleep. Isn’t it nice to know that most of them turn out to be made of nothing but straw?”

— Jerry Spinelli

81. “And the more you love someone, the safer it is to be mad at them. Love can handle mad, no problem.”

— Jerry Spinelli

82. “The blanket was there, but it was the boy’s embrace that covered and warmed him.”

— Jerry Spinelli

83. “Let’s promise to each other that if we ever meet again we will never plow and push our new-fallen snow. We will not become slush. We will stay like this field and melt away together only in the sun’s good time.”

— Jerry Spinelli

84. “She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow.”

— Jerry Spinelli

85. “Every child’s bedroom is as important as a telescope orbiting the planet earth or a philosopher’s study.”

— Jerry Spinelli

86. “And I think every once in a while someone comes along who is a little more primitive than the rest of us, a little closer to our beginnings, a little more in touch with the stuff we’re made of.”

— Jerry Spinelli

87. “We live in a silent explosion, Everything is flying away from everything else... flying away... flying away...”

— Jerry Spinelli

88. “It was different with you, Leo. In the eyes and ears of my heart, you and the magic are one and the same.”

— Jerry Spinelli

89. “As we approached each other, the noise and the students around us melted away and we were utterly alone, passing, smiling, holding each other’s eyes, floors and walls gone, two people in a universe of space and stars.”

— Jerry Spinelli

90. “Unfortunately, he chose to put Arnold down at the one spot in town as bad as Finsterwald’s backyard – namely, Finsterwald’s front steps. When Arnold came to and discovered this, he took off like a horsefly from a swatter. As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back. They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read. 6 About an hour later Mrs.”

— Jerry Spinelli

91. “You are truly focused when you’re so focused that you don’t know you’re focused.”

— Jerry Spinelli

92. “It’s really hard to do nothing totally. Even just sitting here, like this, our bodies are churning, our minds are chattering. There’s a whole commotion going on inside us.”

— Jerry Spinelli

93. “We long to be found, hoping our searchers have not given up and gone home.”

— Jerry Spinelli

94. “Peace and harmony do not require perfection. Thank goodness for that – because life so often seems to be an itch here, a glitch there, a mess waiting to happen. Harmony is flexible. It bends with imperfection. So should you.”

— Jerry Spinelli

95. “She was the opposite of cool; she held nothing back.”

— Jerry Spinelli

96. “Today the mockingbird does not sound very happy. It sounds if it is coming apart. As of the very heart of itself-its song-is breaking into pieces and flying off in a hundred directions.”

— Jerry Spinelli

97. “I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.”

— Jerry Spinelli

98. “I love surprises! That’s what is great about reading. When you open a book, you never know what you’ll find.”

— Jerry Spinelli

99. “Our hearts yearn backward. We long to be found, hoping our searchers have not given up and gone home. But I no longer hope to be found. Do not follow me! Let’s just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I’ll be me, today and today and today, and let’s trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!”

— Jerry Spinelli

100. “Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement.”

— Jerry Spinelli