Quote

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

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Katherine Paterson
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: October 31
Author
Missionary
Novelist
Writer
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson
Else
Front
Hall
Beginning
Troubles
Hewitt
Took
Halls
Willie
Dead
Graves
Decorating
Trouble
Glorious
Decoration
Everyone
Town
Cemetery
War
Towns
Burns
Running
Fronts
Robert

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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.
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. . . 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.
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Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.
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Teachers have almost stopped reading aloud to their classes because of the pressure of testing and tight curricula, but it is the books we read together and talk about together that bring us closer together.
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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.
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Youth is a mortal wound.
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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.
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Shh he said. Look. Where? Can't you see'um? he whispered. All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you. Me? Shh, yes. There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arrving today might be the queen they've been waiting for.
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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.
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It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength.
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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.
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I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.
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the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.
Katherine Paterson
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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.
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It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.
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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.
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...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.
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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.
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You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
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I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.
Katherine Paterson