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This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.

Jerry Spinelli

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Jerry Spinelli
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 1
Novelist
Writer
Norristown
Pennsylvania
Ghetto
Instead
Grow
Grows
Children

More quotes by Jerry Spinelli

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Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?' No,' I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it's not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle.
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I grabbed her, right there outside the lunch room in the swarming mob. I didn't care if others were watching. In fact, i hoped they were. I grabbed her and squeezed her. I had never been so happy and so proud in my life.
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Be very, very careful not to let the facts get mixed up with the truth.
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We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past weird and strange and goofy. Her ways knocked us off balance.
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He doesn't think. He just does. A nonthinking doer.
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Because life doesn't always happen according to a timetable or calendar. And feelings can't be scheduled.
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Star people are rare.
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They don't live here. They live in Heaven.' Where's that?' I don't know,' I said. 'Enos says it's right here, on this side of the wall, but I never saw an angel over here. Kuba says it's in Russia. Olek says Washington America.' What's Washington America?' Enos says it's a place with no wall and no lice and lots of potatoes.
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We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... We discovered the color of each other's eyes.
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You occupied my space. But because you were not in my present, when I looked into my future I saw . . . nothing. Isn't that sad? And stupid?
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Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow.
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No one's hurt is too small, no worry too removed, no blessing so elusive that it cannot be seen by the eyes in the back of the human heart.
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When bad things turn good, the reason can usually be found in the human heart—sometimes in the hearts of great masses of people, sometimes in the heart of a solitary soul.
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Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing.
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I didn't realize we were being watched. We were all being watched
Jerry Spinelli
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Where were we? she said. Getting credit, I said. What about it? Well, it's nice to get credit. The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. Is it? she said.
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Love is big. Love makes room for conflicting feelings.
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Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.
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So, he said, we ourselves will be the candle flames. He put his hands on his chest. Feel your hearts, how warm they are.
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Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow.
Jerry Spinelli