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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
World
Steer
Steers
Grasp
Outside
Fiction
Write
Must
Writing
Chart

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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The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it.
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
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You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.
Katherine Paterson
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You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up.
Katherine Paterson
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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
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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.
Katherine Paterson
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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.
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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I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.
Katherine Paterson
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You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.
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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Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.
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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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
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life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough
Katherine Paterson
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It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
Katherine Paterson
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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.
Katherine Paterson
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...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.
Katherine Paterson
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Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.
Katherine Paterson