Quote

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.

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
Attitude
Name
Names
Give
Giving
Something
Positivity
Shapes
Toward

More quotes by Katherine Paterson

Image
Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.
Katherine Paterson
Image
I am called to listen to the sound of my own heart -- to write the story within myself that demands to be told at that particular point in my life. And if I do this faithfully, clothing that idea in the flesh of human experience and setting it in a true place, the sound from my heart will resound in the reader's heart.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.
Katherine Paterson
Image
It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Since my first novel was rescued from a slush pile, it makes me sad that most publishing houses no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. Nor are many willing to take chances on novels that are not deemed immediately marketable.
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
A dream without a plan is just a wish
Katherine Paterson
Image
Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.
Katherine Paterson
Image
To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Youth is a mortal wound.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Katherine Paterson
Image
You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.
Katherine Paterson
Image
I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and the destruction of death.
Katherine Paterson
Image
I think, she began quietly, I think we want... not just bread for our bellies. We want more than only bread. We want food for our hearts, our souls. We want- how to say it? We want, you know- Puccini music.... we want for our beautiful children some beauty. She leaned over and kissed the curl on her finger. We want roses.
Katherine Paterson
Image
It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.
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
a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.
Katherine Paterson
Image
We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.
Katherine Paterson
Image
Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her. Not the kind of silly stuff Ellie and Brenda giggled about on the telephone. This was too real and too deep to talk about, even to think about very much.
Katherine Paterson