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The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.

Katherine Paterson

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Katherine Paterson
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: October 31
Author
Missionary
Novelist
Writer
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson
Fiction
Write
Must
Writing
Chart
World
Steer
Steers
Grasp
Outside

More quotes by Katherine Paterson

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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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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
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Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.
Katherine Paterson
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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.
Katherine Paterson
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Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.
Katherine Paterson
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Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.
Katherine Paterson
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a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.
Katherine Paterson
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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
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You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.
Katherine Paterson
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We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.
Katherine Paterson
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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.
Katherine Paterson
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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
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The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.
Katherine Paterson
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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
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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.
Katherine Paterson
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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.
Katherine Paterson
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It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.
Katherine Paterson
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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
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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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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