Top 80 Walter Dean Myers Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Reading is not optional.”

— Walter Dean Myers

2. “Idiots don’t know they’re idiots, which is unfortunate.”

— Walter Dean Myers

3. “We all think we’re different, but when it comes around, we end up needing the same things. Somebody to love us. Somebody to respect us.”

— Walter Dean Myers

4. “Cutting people out of your life is easy, keeping them in is hard.”

— Walter Dean Myers

5. “Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I’ll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.”

— Walter Dean Myers

6. “What I do with my books is to create windows to my world that all may peer into. I share the images, the feelings and thoughts, and, I hope, the delight.”

— Walter Dean Myers

7. “Think about all the tomorrows of your life.”

— Walter Dean Myers

8. “Sometimes when things get hard, we tend to set our sights on what’s hard, that difficult thing that keeps us upset, and we turn our back on our strengths.”

— Walter Dean Myers

9. “Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.”

— Walter Dean Myers

10. “It’s a hard life sometimes and the biggest temptation is to let how hard it is be an excuse to weaken.”

— Walter Dean Myers

11. “It’s hard to be brave when you can stumble across a world of hurt around any corner.”

— Walter Dean Myers

12. “When I began to read, I began to exist.”

— Walter Dean Myers

13. “I joined the army on my seventeenth birthday, full of the romance of war after having read a lot of World War I British poetry and having seen a lot of post-World War II films. I thought the romantic presentations of war influenced my joining and my presentation of war to my younger siblings.”

— Walter Dean Myers

14. “I know I’m tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I’m just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can’t dig that? You think I want to live like I’m somebody’s throwaway?”

— Walter Dean Myers

15. “I think that if we can’t go back, then we should try even harder to go forward. And I do want to go forward, to a place where loving someone because they have a gentle smile and a friendly hello is as easy as it once was.”

— Walter Dean Myers

16. “But in the end, we learn we can forgive most people. The cushion of mortality makes their wrongdoing seem less dark, and whatever roads they traveled seem less foolhardy.”

— Walter Dean Myers

17. “Can you become The hope I need? Can you help me be More than it is written in my future Or past? Is there another me to find?”

— Walter Dean Myers

18. “The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.”

— Walter Dean Myers

19. “Each of us is born with a history already in place.”

— Walter Dean Myers

20. “How deep is your game?”

— Walter Dean Myers

21. “Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?”

— Walter Dean Myers

22. “My life is not packaged, Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged Edges that cut even my friends.”

— Walter Dean Myers

23. “On the streets of the city They have taken my Who-I-Am As well as my What-I-Was And now I am desperate for them both Again.”

— Walter Dean Myers

24. “They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can’t kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.”

— Walter Dean Myers

25. “I think it’s difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They’re embarrassed to have people see them doing it.”

— Walter Dean Myers

26. “And what I was feeling was the wonder Of being more than me, of being more Than mere here and now allowed I had become a shining star, a burning nova Exploded with love Flying through an endlessly Expanding universe Away from the me that was Toward a me that is beyond Understanding.”

— Walter Dean Myers

27. “We need to tell kids flat out: reading is not optional.”

— Walter Dean Myers

28. “With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.”

— Walter Dean Myers

29. “Nothing sounds better than being away from this mess. Nothing sounds better right now than getting higher than the hole I’m in.”

— Walter Dean Myers

30. “Looks to me like you’ve been making garbage for a while and dragging it with you. Now you need to get out of here, and that garbage is weighing you down.”

— Walter Dean Myers

31. “Each generation seems to invent its own reasons for war.”

— Walter Dean Myers

32. “Things that matter in the morning somehow don’t matter in the afternoon.”

— Walter Dean Myers

33. “Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning. The movie is in black and white, and grainy. Sometimes the camera moves in so close that you can’t tell what is going on and you just listen to the sounds and guess.”

— Walter Dean Myers

34. “When Miss O’Brien looked at me... what did she see that caused her to turn away? What did she see?”

— Walter Dean Myers

35. “The idea of voluntary segregation went against every value I had been taught. What did being born black have to do with excellence?”

— Walter Dean Myers

36. “I just wanted to be a human being. I just wanted to be whoever I saw in the mirror, without a race or a place in life. What is so wrong with that?”

— Walter Dean Myers

37. “If you know you don’t have a win, then there’s no use for you being in the game.”

— Walter Dean Myers

38. “The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.”

— Walter Dean Myers

39. “Yes, she is the fruit that will Sustain me and yes, she brings A rain that I know can chill But it is a rain so sweet and sings A song my soul insists That I follow, if I would exist As more than I have ever, ever been If my mother calls it evil, then I embrace the sin.”

— Walter Dean Myers

40. “If anyone could look into my head See or feel the dread that has captured Me or see within this sad, unhappy brain They would only turn away Turn away.”

— Walter Dean Myers

41. “She is the only rose that doesn’t smell of plastic.”

— Walter Dean Myers

42. “And I see the – you know, when I go to the juvenile detention centers and prisons, I see people who can’t read now. And I know that when they leave those prisons and those detention centers, they’re not going to be able to make it in our society.”

— Walter Dean Myers

43. “Each time I think there is no place lower to go, I find that there is at least one place that will mess you up worse than you were.”

— Walter Dean Myers

44. “Violence was just as much about WHAT was happening as it was how it happened.”

— Walter Dean Myers

45. “But now, like a fallen sparrow On a golden chain, I’m forever bound in shadow, A prisoner to my pain.”

— Walter Dean Myers

46. “There was a baseball game on but it didn’t look real. It was guys in uniforms playing games on a deep green field. They were playing baseball as if baseball was important and as if all the world wasn’t in jail, watching them from a completely different world.”

— Walter Dean Myers

47. “CUT TO: ERNIE, another prisoner, sitting on john, pants down.”

— Walter Dean Myers

48. “I read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

— Walter Dean Myers

49. “New York is my favorite city.”

— Walter Dean Myers

50. “Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. It is a strange movie with no plot and no beginning. The movie is in black and white, and grainy.”

— Walter Dean Myers