Quote

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.

Katherine Paterson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Katherine Paterson
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: October 31
Author
Missionary
Novelist
Writer
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson
Mistake
Path
Learn
Honorable
Horrible
Mistakes

More quotes by Katherine Paterson

Image
If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
Katherine Paterson
Image
...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.
Katherine Paterson
Image
I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.
Katherine Paterson
Image
It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.
Katherine Paterson
Image
You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.
Katherine Paterson
Image
As much pleasure as young people get from Twittering and texting, there is no way these activities will nourish their minds and spirits the way literature can.
Katherine Paterson
Image
You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.
Katherine Paterson
Image
This is what art is all about. It is weaving fabric from the feathers you have plucked from your own breast. But no one must ever see the process - only the finished bolt of goods. They must never suspect that that crimson thread running through the pattern is blood.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.
Katherine Paterson
Image
I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.
Katherine Paterson
Image
On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.
Katherine Paterson
Image
One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.
Katherine Paterson
Image
If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?
Katherine Paterson
Image
a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Youth is a mortal wound.
Katherine Paterson
Image
We can read the paper or current magazines and learn about national and world events, think about controversial subjects, learn how to disagree respectfully, and how, finally, to act on our convictions. We can read for pure delight, and if we do this as a family or classroom or other group we can build wonderful memories.
Katherine Paterson
Image
. . . Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside himself like a pirate treasure. He was rich, very rich, but no one could know about it for now except his fellow outlaw, Julia Edmunds.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.
Katherine Paterson
Image
The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.
Katherine Paterson
Image
I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.
Katherine Paterson