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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
Grow
Grows
Children
Ghetto
Instead

More quotes by Jerry Spinelli

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Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.
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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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He doesn't think. He just does. A nonthinking doer.
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Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me.
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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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We live in a silent explosion, Everything is flying away from everything else... flying away... flying away...
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Or maybe you’re merely uncomfortable with uncertainty. Like the rest of the human race.
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She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's but timid introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life
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Maybe it was the angle, but her fawn's eyes, looking up at me, seemed larger than ever. I had to make an effort to keep my balance lest I fall into them.
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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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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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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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I went to Gettysburg College, where the famous Civil War battle was fought. I majored in English. I would've liked to major in writing, but they didn't offer a major in that.
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We long to be found, hoping our searchers have not given up and gone home.
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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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Nobody has the time, the time cannot be owned. The time is free to everyone
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I think of the flower in the bud: huddled, compressed, dark. Yet somehow it feels the night, knows moon from sun. It waits...waits.
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A strong relationship is an honest relationship, and no honest relationship is all peaches and cream. Love is the key. Where love abides, anger is but a passing visitor.
Jerry Spinelli
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Letter from Mr. B: Why does a back scratch feel better coming from somebody else than if you do it yourself?
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Because that's what you do, you stand up for your best friend. And you eat lunch with him and talk with him and share secrets and laugh a lot and go places and do stuff, and when you wake up in the morning, he's the first person you think of.
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