Top 180 Katherine Paterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire.”

— Katherine Paterson

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

— Katherine Paterson

103. “Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse – except August.”

— Katherine Paterson

104. “Jess followed, still trying to figure out why two grown people and a smart girl like Leslie wanted to leave a comfortable life in the suburbs for a place like this. They watched the bus roar off.”

— Katherine Paterson

105. “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

106. “I don’t care. I don’t care”. He was crying now, crying so hard he could barely breathe.”

— Katherine Paterson

107. “Since my first novel was rescued from a slush pile, it makes me sad that most publishing houses no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. Nor are many willing to take chances on novels that are not deemed immediately “marketable.””

— Katherine Paterson

108. “Words are humanity’s greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren’t cheap. They are very precious.”

— Katherine Paterson

109. “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

110. “There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.”

— Katherine Paterson

111. “As much pleasure as young people get from Twittering and texting, there is no way these activities will nourish their minds and spirits the way literature can.”

— Katherine Paterson

112. “I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.”

— Katherine Paterson

113. “I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm. There was nothing I could do about it. I seemed relatively harmless. After.”

— Katherine Paterson

114. “I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.”

— Katherine Paterson

115. “It seemed to Gilly that everything in this world that you can’t stand to wait one extra minute for is always late.”

— Katherine Paterson

116. “Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I’m sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.”

— Katherine Paterson

117. “He nodded vigorously. Anything was better than promising to fight Janice Avery.”

— Katherine Paterson

118. “John softened, and many years later he said to me, “You know, if we were ever to divorce, I get the cat.” There is a.”

— Katherine Paterson

119. “The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea ‘doth’ not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.”

— Katherine Paterson

120. “He thought later how peculiar it was that here was probably the biggest thing in his life, and he had shrugged it off as nothing.”

— Katherine Paterson

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

— Katherine Paterson

122. “Once there, the chaplain closed the door and threw his arms around her. Alarmed, she jammed the heel of her pump into his foot. He let go with a howl and she fled. The incident was never spoken of again until she had daughters of her own. I can remember at about thirteen staring wide-eyed at my proper mother when she thought it time to tell me this cautionary tale.”

— Katherine Paterson

123. “The Municipal Councils in these areas excluded Chinese members, and the police and civil servants were foreigners. Even the names of the streets reflected foreign imperialism – such as Jessfield Road, on which St. Faith’s was located.”

— Katherine Paterson

124. “They decided they were too hooked on money and success, so they bought that old farm and they’re going to farm it and think about what’s important.”

— Katherine Paterson

125. “We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story...”

— Katherine Paterson

126. “Words are humanity’s greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren’t cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.”

— Katherine Paterson

127. “Jess wouldn’t argue that, but he saw her as a beautiful wild creature who had been caught for a moment in that dirty old cage of a schoolhouse, perhaps by mistake.”

— Katherine Paterson

128. “Kids often ask me if characters are real or made up – and I always tell them, ‘I hope they’re real but I made them up.’”

— Katherine Paterson

129. “I stood there and watched thirty-five children disappear in almost as many different directions and was suddenly horrified by what I’d done. What if someone got lost or hurt? Suppose they didn’t come back on time? What would I do then?”

— Katherine Paterson

130. “It’s such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, ‘I read your book as a child and really loved it.’ That’s a tremendous compliment.”

— Katherine Paterson

131. “A colleague of hers had discovered that the Biblical sentence found in John 4:7 contained all the sounds in nearly every known language.”

— Katherine Paterson

132. “This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett’s Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. Actually he was mortally wounded very close to Cemetery Hill on July 2 the day before that tragic charge.”

— Katherine Paterson

133. “Boy, girl, you just better not try me.” He made her swear on the Bible never to tell and never to follow, but still he lay awake a long time. How could he trust everything that mattered to him to a sassy six-year-old? 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

134. “I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.”

— Katherine Paterson

135. “One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn’t finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason.”

— Katherine Paterson

136. “The Womeldorf family loved music, and one of Daddy’s happiest memories was of the day his father came home from town bearing a morning glory horn Edison phonograph with round cylinder records. “How on earth could that contraption sing and play lovely music?” he remembered marveling. The family considered it the wonder of the age and loved listening to it.”

— Katherine Paterson

137. “I had so looked forward to her walking.” Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. “Walk to Daddy,” Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the few steps across the space to her father’s chair.”

— Katherine Paterson

138. “She had nothing against any of the other guests, but once she started she saw no way to stop. There was nothing to do but turn the hose against every arriving guest. No one coming out of the house to reason with her was safe either.”

— Katherine Paterson

139. “The conquering army had perpetrated untold atrocities. The Japanese had occupied my home and twice forced us to leave the land I loved.”

— Katherine Paterson

140. “How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life about him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry fossil upon the page?”

— Katherine Paterson

141. “It is a mysterious thing how cheerful people become in the face of disaster. My father whistled as he boarded up the windows, and my mother from time to time would call to him happily out the back door. She obviously was enjoying the unusual pleasure of having him home on a weekday morning. Tomorrow they might be ruined or dead, today they had each other.”

— Katherine Paterson

142. “No,” I said primly, I had no intention of being a writer because “I wouldn’t want to add another mediocre writer to the world.”

— Katherine Paterson

143. “She looked at him as if she were going to argue, then seemed to change her mind. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don’t have to believe it, and I think it’s beautiful.” She shook her head again. “It’s crazy.”

— Katherine Paterson

144. “We can still hop.”

— Katherine Paterson

145. “He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.”

— Katherine Paterson

146. “The idea of living in the same house for all your childhood and having the same knot of devoted friends seemed magical to me, who had lived in thirteen different places by the time I was thirteen.”

— Katherine Paterson

147. “I got up the nerve to ask her if she remembered that first visit and my terrible faux pas. She pretended, in true Japanese fashion, that it had never happened.”

— Katherine Paterson

148. “So we children must be thankful to the imperious Dr. Young for making it possible for our parents to meet and our subsequent births.”

— Katherine Paterson

149. “Brenda burst in. “Do you know what some people do? They charge something and wear it, and then take it back and say it didn’t fit or something. The stores don’t give ’em no trouble.” Her father turned in a kind of roar. “I never heard such a fool thing in my life. Didn’t you hear your mother tell you to shut your mouth, girl!”

— Katherine Paterson

150. “Dammit, Trotter. Don’t try to make a stinking Christian out of me.”

— Katherine Paterson