Top 180 Katherine Paterson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A dream without a plan is just a wish.”

— Katherine Paterson

2. “A library is a feast to which we are all invited.”

— Katherine Paterson

3. “Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.”

— Katherine Paterson

4. “Just close your eyes and keep your mind wide open.”

— Katherine Paterson

5. “It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations- something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.”

— Katherine Paterson

6. “It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.”

— Katherine Paterson

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

— Katherine Paterson

8. “Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don’t have to be ashamed.”

— Katherine Paterson

9. “You don’t have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you’ve been given.”

— Katherine Paterson

10. “I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?”

— Katherine Paterson

11. “Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.”

— Katherine Paterson

12. “Teachers have almost stopped reading aloud to their classes because of the pressure of testing and tight curricula, but it is the books we read together and talk about together that bring us closer together.”

— Katherine Paterson

13. “She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there – like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.”

— Katherine Paterson

14. “I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you’re not the center of the universe.”

— Katherine Paterson

15. “Handle with care – everything – even the predators.”

— Katherine Paterson

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

— Katherine Paterson

17. “What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.”

— Katherine Paterson

18. “Bridge to Terabithia takes us by the hand and leads us into a room that we have never entered before. After we read this story, we cannot unknow what we now know. We are devastated, emotionally rent. But still: we feel held, loved, seen. Someone trusted us enough to tell us the truth; and because of that, the room is golden, brimful of light.”

— Katherine Paterson

19. “It’s the principle of the thing, Jess. That’s what you’ve got to understand. You have to stop people like that. Otherwise they turn into tyrants and dictators.”

— Katherine Paterson

20. “Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.”

— Katherine Paterson

21. “I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.”

— Katherine Paterson

22. “Youth is a mortal wound.”

— Katherine Paterson

23. “Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.”

— Katherine Paterson

24. “One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.”

— Katherine Paterson

25. “I ain’t got no blood claim on you, and the Lord in Heaven knows I want you to have a good life with your own people. But” – her huge bass voice broke up into little squeaky pieces – “but it’s killing me to see you go.”

— Katherine Paterson

26. “To blame were two young radicals, a country bumpkin named Mao Tse-tung and a disillusioned intellectual by the name of Zhou En Lai. These two had had the nerve to ask the owners of the mills to install safety devices so that the children and old people who worked long hours would no longer in their weariness lose fingers and even hands in the machinery.”

— Katherine Paterson

27. “Leslie named their secret land “Terabithia,” and she loaned Jess all of her books about Narnia, so he would know how things went in a magic kingdom – how the animals and the trees must be protected and how a ruler must behave.”

— Katherine Paterson

28. “It’s like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.”

— Katherine Paterson

29. “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.”

— Katherine Paterson

30. “You have to believe it and you hate it. I don’t have to and I think it’s beautiful.”

— Katherine Paterson

31. “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.”

— Katherine Paterson

32. “You think it’s so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain’t.”

— Katherine Paterson

33. “Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.”

— Katherine Paterson

34. “You never know ahead of time what something’s really going to be like.”

— Katherine Paterson

35. “I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.”

— Katherine Paterson

36. “Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.”

— Katherine Paterson

37. “February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.”

— Katherine Paterson

38. “I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone – children, young people, adults – was: Read for your life.”

— Katherine Paterson

39. “You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.”

— Katherine Paterson

40. “Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self – his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.”

— Katherine Paterson

41. “He may not have been born with guts, but he didn’t have to die without them.”

— Katherine Paterson

42. “We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.”

— Katherine Paterson

43. “They ate a late lunch in the cafeteria. When she mentioned lunch, he realized with horror that he would need money, and he didn’t know how to tell her that he hadn’t brought any – didn’t have any to bring, for that matter. But before he had time to figure anything out, she said, “Now I’m not going to have any argument about whose paying. I’m a liberated woman, Jess Aarons. When I invite a man out, I pay.”

— Katherine Paterson

44. “If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?”

— Katherine Paterson

45. “Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.”

— Katherine Paterson

46. “You’re the proverbial diamond in the rough”, she’d said to him once, touching his nose lightly with the tip of her electrifying finger.”

— Katherine Paterson

47. “If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?” “Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?”

— Katherine Paterson

48. “It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.”

— Katherine Paterson

49. “Sometimes you need to give people something that’s for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.”

— Katherine Paterson

50. “Jess tried going to Terabithia alone, but it was no good. It needed Leslie to make the magic.”

— Katherine Paterson