Top 180 Katherine Paterson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “As I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who have taken away my time are those who have given me something to say.”

— Katherine Paterson

52. “He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name – John Goetchius – but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.”

— Katherine Paterson

53. “The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.”

— Katherine Paterson

54. “Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they’re not.”

— Katherine Paterson

55. “Lord, let me heed the angels you put in my path.”

— Katherine Paterson

56. “My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart.”

— Katherine Paterson

57. “Jess’s feelings about Leslie’s father poked up like a canker sore. You keep biting it, and it gets bigger and worse instead of better.”

— Katherine Paterson

58. “Even a prince may be a fool.”

— Katherine Paterson

59. “If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don’t even know it, who wouldn’t believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.”

— Katherine Paterson

60. “Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.”

— Katherine Paterson

61. “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.”

— Katherine Paterson

62. “Once a book is published, it no longer belongs to me. My creative task is done. The work now belongs to the creative mind of my readers. I had my turn to make of it what I would, now it is their turn.”

— Katherine Paterson

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

— Katherine Paterson

64. “For the only time in my life I would be living with a chain-smoking semi-invalid whose chief point of pride in life was his membership in the Ku Klux Clan.”

— Katherine Paterson

65. “I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part.”

— Katherine Paterson

66. “Don’t tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don’t need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you’re after, my dear.”

— Katherine Paterson

67. “What I have come to believe is that joy is the twin sister of gratitude. I am most joyful when I am most grateful.”

— Katherine Paterson

68. “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.”

— Katherine Paterson

69. “It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it.”

— Katherine Paterson

70. “This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process – only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.”

— Katherine Paterson

71. “The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.”

— Katherine Paterson

72. “Leslie was one of those people who sat quietly at her desk, never whispering or daydreaming or chewing gum, doing beautiful schoolwork, and yet her brain was so full of mischief that if the teacher could have once seen through that mask of perfection, she would have thrown her out in horror.”

— Katherine Paterson

73. “The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos...”

— Katherine Paterson

74. “But I had never caused my parents ‘a minute’s worry’. Didn’t they know that worry proves you care? Didn’t they realize that I needed their worry to assure myself that I was something?”

— Katherine Paterson

75. “Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her. Not the kind of silly stuff Ellie and Brenda giggled about on the telephone. This was too real and too deep to talk about, even to think about very much.”

— Katherine Paterson

76. “Self-censorship can be very damaging to a story. When our chief goal is not to offend someone, we are not likely to write a book that will deeply affect someone.”

— Katherine Paterson

77. “Someday, when he was good enough, he would ask her to write them in a book and let him do all the pictures.”

— Katherine Paterson

78. “I just can’t get the poetry of the trees,” he said.”

— Katherine Paterson

79. “That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn’t believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.”

— Katherine Paterson

80. “We do have trouble dealing with death, but it’s the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.”

— Katherine Paterson

81. “The basic task of education is the care and feeding of the imagination.”

— Katherine Paterson

82. “The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.”

— Katherine Paterson

83. “Like God in the Bible, they looked at what they had made and found it very good.”

— Katherine Paterson

84. “Trouble can always be borne when it is shared.”

— Katherine Paterson

85. “Civilization as well as education takes a downward spiral when it ceases to ask “What is truth?” and concerns itself primarily with what is measurable.”

— Katherine Paterson

86. “Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.”

— Katherine Paterson

87. “Are you tired, Mary?” I asked. She raised her weary gaze to me. “My socks are tired,” she said. “And my shoes won’t even walk.” To this day whenever in our family we want to express complete exhaustion, we employ Mary’s eloquent description of her socks.”

— Katherine Paterson

88. “The work reveals the creator – and as our universe in its vastness, its orderliness, its exquisite detail, tells us something of the One who made it, so a work of fiction, for better or worse, will reveal the writer.”

— Katherine Paterson

89. “Listening to that woman was like licking melted ice cream off the carton.”

— Katherine Paterson

90. “Drive them out utterly, so they may never return and prey upon our people.”

— Katherine Paterson

91. “Brenda’s pouting voice broke in, “Your girl friend’s dead, and Momma thought you was dead, too.”

— Katherine Paterson

92. “It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace – fear and selfishness.”

— Katherine Paterson

93. “A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.”

— Katherine Paterson

94. “Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body.”

— Katherine Paterson

95. “Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.”

— Katherine Paterson

96. “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.”

— Katherine Paterson

97. “Then Jess gave himself over to the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from a corner of his brain.”

— Katherine Paterson

98. “It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.”

— Katherine Paterson

99. “If you’re so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?”

— Katherine Paterson

100. “I realize, of course, that I wasn’t born knowing how to read. I just can’t imagine a time when I didn’t know how.”

— Katherine Paterson