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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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
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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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The trouble with miracles is, they don't last long.
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If I get a new idea today—or any day—I won't run from it. I won't trash it. If it's something I really want to do—I'll do it.
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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.
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.
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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The kids who leave their favorite authors behind do not in fact leave us utterly abandoned, but in due time drive children of their own to the bookstore and the post office.
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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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If we are destined to be together again, be happy to know you’ll be getting the real me, not some blubbering half me.
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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
Jerry Spinelli
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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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I’ll still be missing you as much as ever. I’l still smile at the memory of you. I’ll still be - Okay, I’ll say it again - loving you, but I won’t abandon myseld for you. I cannot be faithful to you without being faithful to myself.
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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She laughed when there was no joke. She danced when there was no music. She had no friends, yet she was the friendliest person in school.
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.
Jerry Spinelli
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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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You are truly focused when you're so focused that you don't know you're focused.
Jerry Spinelli
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Events become feelings, feelings become events
Jerry Spinelli
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This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up.
Jerry Spinelli