Top 160 Jerry Spinelli Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians.”

— Jerry Spinelli

103. “Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips.”

— Jerry Spinelli

104. “You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you, but now you’ll never know.”

— Jerry Spinelli

105. “Tanks rolled up the boulevard four by four and the sky shook on its hinges.”

— Jerry Spinelli

106. “He said he would try, but I guess he never got the chance. About the last thing I remember him saying was “Don’t worry so much about it. It’s not the sneakers that count, it’s the feet.”

— Jerry Spinelli

107. “And I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s no difference anymore between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain.”

— Jerry Spinelli

108. “Letter from Mr. B: Why does a back scratch feel better coming from somebody else than if you do it yourself?”

— Jerry Spinelli

109. “I saw a little girl in a wooden wagon, her dress spilling colors over its sides, staring at the rising sun as if it were the very dawn of creation.”

— Jerry Spinelli

110. “Early on, Zinkoff’s mother impressed upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Zinkoff has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or another he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown’s hat. But never his father’s mailbag.”

— Jerry Spinelli

111. “So,” he said, “we ourselves will be the candle flames.” He put his hands on his chest. “Feel your hearts, how warm they are.”

— Jerry Spinelli

112. “I mean if she’s real, she’s in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who’s really like that is going to last around here?”

— Jerry Spinelli

113. “Now I don’t really write for adults or kids – I don’t write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that, otherwise you end up preaching down.”

— Jerry Spinelli

114. “Vowels were something else. He didn’t like them and they didn’t like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn’t tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.”

— Jerry Spinelli

115. “Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.”

— Jerry Spinelli

116. “It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against.”

— Jerry Spinelli

117. “How much better might human communication be if words were as precious as diamonds? If each of us were allotted only 100 words per day?”

— Jerry Spinelli

118. “I could feel it in myself. I felt lighter, unshackled, as if something I had been carrying had fallen away... I just enjoyed the feeling and watched the once amorphous student body separate itself into hundreds of individuals. The pronoun ‘we’ itself seemed to crack and drift apart in pieces.”

— Jerry Spinelli

119. “They say talk is cheap. Maybe so. But kindness is even better – it’s free! Free to give. Free to receive. Makes you wonder why there’s not more of it, huh?”

— Jerry Spinelli

120. “I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag – it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, ‘Thanks for the card.’ Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off.”

— Jerry Spinelli

121. “She was gone. She was serenity. Her lips faintly smiling. Her golden skin. The glowing thread-ends of her hair. She seemed to have been dipped iin sunlight and set here to dry. I felt a pang of jealousy, that she could be sitting next to me and not know it. That she could be somewhere most wonderful and I could not be there, too.”

— Jerry Spinelli

122. “Because life doesn’t always happen according to a timetable or calendar. And feelings can’t be scheduled.”

— Jerry Spinelli

123. “She taught me to revel She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh.”

— Jerry Spinelli

124. “I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn’t care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.”

— Jerry Spinelli

125. “He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird... He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it’s pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there.”

— Jerry Spinelli

126. “You” – he pointed at me – “are the black pearl.”

— Jerry Spinelli

127. “Love is big. Love makes room for conflicting feelings.”

— Jerry Spinelli

128. “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.”

— Jerry Spinelli

129. “The kids who leave their favorite authors behind do not in fact leave us utterly abandoned, but in due time drive children of their own to the bookstore and the post office.”

— Jerry Spinelli

130. “You haven’t lived until you’ve basked in the adoration of people.”

— Jerry Spinelli

131. “Every day I hold my breath until I see her. Sometimes in class, sometimes in the hallway. I can’t start breathing until I see her smile at me. She always does, but the next day I’m always afraid she won’t. At lunch I’m afraid she’ll smile more at BT than at me. I’m afraid she’ll look at him in some way that she doesn’t look at me. I’m afraid that when I go to bed at night I’ll still be wondering. I’m always afraid. Is that what love is – fear?”

— Jerry Spinelli

132. “I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I’m best equipped to do that.”

— Jerry Spinelli

133. “It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against. For ourselves. For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long.”

— Jerry Spinelli

134. “But those pictures and those moments are posed and smiling. They’re not as real as this.”

— Jerry Spinelli

135. “I became a children’s author by accident.”

— Jerry Spinelli

136. “It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn’t belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April’s orphans.”

— Jerry Spinelli

137. “Strange territory for me: the after-snap. I still feel myself vibrating. Humming.”

— Jerry Spinelli

138. “For hours I lay under my sheet of moonlight. Her voice came through the night, from the light, from the stars.”

— Jerry Spinelli

139. “There’s nothing sadder than a sobbing waffle.”

— Jerry Spinelli

140. “No one’s hurt is too small, no worry too removed, no blessing so elusive that it cannot be seen by the eyes in the back of the human heart.”

— Jerry Spinelli

141. “Kids still can be said to live in their own little world. Even if their parents are helicoptering around them, assigning play dates and so forth, I think they’re still living in some sense of their own little perceptual worlds.”

— Jerry Spinelli

142. “History sits on our shoulders, while reading opens our hearts.”

— Jerry Spinelli

143. “He was the Grand Marshall of our Everyday Parade.”

— Jerry Spinelli

144. “The horizontal world I had thought I occupied was tilting, dumping me somewhere else, somewhere new.”

— Jerry Spinelli

145. “But feelings, they don’t care about telling. They just go right on, piling on top of one another like a big sandwich.”

— Jerry Spinelli

146. “Have you ever stopped to appreciate the simple ability to open your front door and step outside?”

— Jerry Spinelli

147. “He doesn’t think. He just does. A nonthinking doer.”

— Jerry Spinelli

148. “The pure whiteness, dazzling in the sun, was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Who was I to spoil it? Snow falls. Earth says: Here’s a gift for you. And what do we do? We shovel it. Blow it. Scrape it. Plow it. Get it out of our way. We push it to our fringes. Is there anything uglier or sadder than a ten-day-old snow dump? It’s not even snow anymore. It’s slush.”

— Jerry Spinelli

149. “If I get a new idea today – or any day – I won’t run from it. I won’t trash it. If it’s something I really want to do – I’ll do it.”

— Jerry Spinelli

150. “Her voice came through the night, from the light, from the stars.”

— Jerry Spinelli