Quote

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.

Jerry Spinelli

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Jerry Spinelli
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: February 1
Novelist
Writer
Norristown
Pennsylvania
Writing
Listen
Told
Story
Voice
Write
Railroad
Stories
Railroads
Seems
Track
Best
Ears

More quotes by Jerry Spinelli

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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.
Jerry Spinelli
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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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Peer pressure is just that: pressure.
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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.
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Love is big. Love makes room for conflicting feelings.
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Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing.
Jerry Spinelli
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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.
Jerry Spinelli
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Who are you if you lose your favorite person? Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? I reach for Stargirl and she's gone. I'm not me anymore.
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Star people are rare.
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This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.
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Today the mockingbird does not sound very happy. It sounds if it is coming apart. As of the very heart of itself-its song-is breaking into pieces and flying off in a hundred directions.
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Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me.
Jerry Spinelli
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Every name is real. That's the nature of names.
Jerry Spinelli
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I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I'm best equipped to do that.
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In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.
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She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.
Jerry Spinelli
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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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And the more you love someone, the safer it is to be mad at them. Love can handle mad, no problem.
Jerry Spinelli
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I didn't realize we were being watched. We were all being watched
Jerry Spinelli
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Nothing’s more fun than being carried away.
Jerry Spinelli