Top 35 Richard Peck Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When I read a good book, it’s like traveling the world without ever leaving my chair.”

— Richard Peck

2. “I read because one life isn’t enough and in the pages of a book, I can be anybody.”

— Richard Peck

3. “Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.”

— Richard Peck

4. “Because nobody but a reader ever became a writer.”

— Richard Peck

5. “Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.”

— Richard Peck

6. “We write by the light of every story we have ever read.”

— Richard Peck

7. “I read because one of these days I’m going to get out of this town, and I’m going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready.”

— Richard Peck

8. “The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.”

— Richard Peck

9. “If you’re going to read minds, start with a simple one.”

— Richard Peck

10. “As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.”

— Richard Peck

11. “Why she hankered to be a teacher, I couldn’t tell you. But she had chalk dust in her veins, and she deserved to get that certificate. It was only fair.”

— Richard Peck

12. “I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.”

— Richard Peck

13. “Never trust an ugly woman. She’s got a grudge against the world,′ said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.”

— Richard Peck

14. “I’m so far gone that I’m telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.”

— Richard Peck

15. “Stay away from people who don’t know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who’ll want to label you. People who’ll try to write their fears on your face.”

— Richard Peck

16. “Martin Wilson’s What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood...”

— Richard Peck

17. “The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.”

— Richard Peck

18. “Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.”

— Richard Peck

19. “If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.”

— Richard Peck

20. “Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.”

— Richard Peck

21. “With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.”

— Richard Peck

22. “Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.”

— Richard Peck

23. “This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It’s just that simple.”

— Richard Peck

24. “We thought he was weird. He thought we were weird. It was great. It was what multiculturalism ought to be” -Archer.”

— Richard Peck

25. “A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.”

— Richard Peck

26. “But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.”

— Richard Peck

27. “That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.”

— Richard Peck

28. “She had eyes in the back of her heart.”

— Richard Peck

29. “Then a lady flounced up and perched on the seat opposite. She had a full bird on the wing sewn to the crown of her hat, and she was painted up like a circus pony, so we took her to be from Chicago.”

— Richard Peck

30. “I am here to help her learn,” Tansy said, “not to keep her from it.”

— Richard Peck

31. “So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.”

— Richard Peck

32. “Aunt Agnes said, “It’s hard to make a good Christian out of a cat.”

— Richard Peck

33. “I don’t think grandma’s a very good influence on us.”

— Richard Peck

34. “Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds.”

— Richard Peck

35. “The sobs came then, faster than she could swallow. A teacher dares not cry, not a real teacher.”

— Richard Peck

36. “We don’t write what we know. We write what we wonder about.”

— Richard Peck

37. “We’d gotten him wrong. He wasn’t a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he’d seen us all a good deal clearer than we’d ever seen him.”

— Richard Peck

38. “We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We’d heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there’s enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We’d go to their fair, but we weren’t going to drink their water.”

— Richard Peck

39. “Only the nonreader fears books.”

— Richard Peck

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