Jerry Spinelli Quotes & Sayings

Events become feelings, feelings become events — Jerry Spinelli

I'm not sure," she said. "There's no one answer to that. You have to
find your own way. Sometimes I try to erase myself. I imagine a big
pink soft soap eraser, and it's going back and forth, back and forth,
and it starts down at my toes, back and forth, back and forth, and
there they go-poof!-my toes are gone. And then my feet. And then my
ankles. But that's the easy part. The hard part is erasing my senses-my
eyes, my ears, my nose, my tongue. And last to go is my brain. My
thoughts, memories, all the voices inside my head. That's the hardest,
erasing my thoughts." She chuckled faintly. "My pumpkin. And then, if
I've done a good job, I'm erased. I'm gone. I'm nothing. And then the
world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl. — Jerry Spinelli

I played Little League in junior high and high school. — Jerry Spinelli

No When. No Then. Only Now. — Jerry Spinelli

More often than not, my reference point is not the kids or the grandkids but myself when I was that age. I remember the days at Hartranft Elementary and Stewart Junior High in Norristown. — Jerry Spinelli

MRI good ... X-ray good ... blood work good ...
If everything's so good, what the hell's she doing here? — Jerry Spinelli

I'm that way, goofy as it sounds. Sometimes I don't want things to happen-I'm talking about good things, even wonderful things-because once they happen, I can't look forward to them anymore. But there's an upside, too. Once a wonderful thing is over, I'm not all that sad because then I can start thinking about it, reliving and reliving it in the virtual world in my head. — Jerry Spinelli

She laughed, and the desert sang. — Jerry Spinelli

It is said that kids have no use for the word 'then'. It is said that only 'now' and 'this minute' count with kids. It is said that kids believe time began the day they were born. How sad if this were true. It would mean kids believe they live on a tiny, isolated island in time. It would mean that when they look back, they fail to see the fascinating human adventure that led up to that day when they were born. It would mean that when they look back, they see ... nothing. — Jerry Spinelli

Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing. — Jerry Spinelli

A baseball bat could not have hit me harder than that smile did. I was sixteen years old. In that time, how many thousands of smiles had been aimed at me? so why did this one feel like the first? — Jerry Spinelli

I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I'm best equipped to do that. — Jerry Spinelli

Maniac Magee was not born in a dump. — Jerry Spinelli

She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew. — Jerry Spinelli

He stared at me. "She liked you, boy." The intensity of his voice and eyes made me blink.
"Yes," I said.
"She did it for you, you know."
"What?"
"Gave up her self, for a while there. She loved you that much. What an incredibly lucky kid you were."
I could not look at him. "I know."
He shook his head with a wistful sadness. "No, you don't. You can't know yet. Maybe someday ... "
I knew he was tempted to say more. Probably to tell me how stupid I was, how cowardly, that I blew the best
chance I would ever have. But his smile returned, and his eyes were tender again, and nothing harsher
than cherry smoke came out of his mouth. — Jerry Spinelli

He wagged his finger in my face. "You're not SUPPOSED to do anything. YOU'RE the one trying to change ME. Remember? As far as I'M concerned, YOU can do anything you want."
"Except criticize you."
"Hey," he said, "if that's how you want to spend your life, getting on my case"
he threw out his arms
"be my guest." He turned his deep blue eyes on me. "And anyway
" He let it hang there. He was smirking.
Suddenly I felt as if I were on roller skates. "What?"
"I know why you're doing it."
I stopped. He walked on.
"Doing what?" I said. "What? Why?" I think I was babbling.
He flipped his answer as blithely as a candy wrapper over his shoulder: "You know. — Jerry Spinelli

Actually, between books is precisely when I do give myself vacations. — Jerry Spinelli

Love makes its own magic. — Jerry Spinelli

And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert. — Jerry Spinelli

did not have enough substance to trigger the opening of a supermarket door — Jerry Spinelli

I was feeling nine ways at once, and they all ended up at the touch of her hand on my ear ... — Jerry Spinelli

Home is everything you can walk to. — Jerry Spinelli

Around fourth grade something similar happens with eyes. The baby eyes don't drop out, nor are there eye fairies around to leave quarters under pillows, but new eyes do arrive nevertheless. Big-kid eyes replace little-kid eyes. Little-kid eyes are scoopers. They just scoop up everything they see and swallow it whole, no questions asked. Big-kid eyes are picky. They notice things that little-kid eyes never bothered with: the way a teacher blows her nose, the way a kid dresses or pronounces a word. — Jerry Spinelli

Or maybe you're merely uncomfortable with uncertainty. Like the rest of the human race. — Jerry Spinelli

I think of the flower in the bud: huddled, compressed, dark. Yet somehow it feels the night, knows moon from sun. It waits ... waits. — Jerry Spinelli

Do not follow me! Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tommorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies! — Jerry Spinelli

He said even if it's too cloudy to see, the sun will still rise, it will still be there.
"But that's the whole point," I said. "Seeing it."
"Is it?" he said. — Jerry Spinelli

I have a curious background for someone who turns out to be a writer. — Jerry Spinelli

Ma-niac, Ma-niac
He's so cool
Ma-niac, Ma-niac
Don't go to school
Runs all night
Runs all right
Ma-niac, Ma-niac
Kissed a bull! — Jerry Spinelli

No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about ... One thing's for sure - no one but you can be the hero of your story. — Jerry Spinelli

You're a kid trying to figure out the world you were born into, that's all. — Jerry Spinelli

But she loves her daughter, David can tell, loves her the way David's mother loved him, and sometimes David feels that same love he used to, except now it's coming from other places, other people, and it's a good thing the love is coming because he's beginning to think there aren't enough rules in the universe to bring his mother back. — Jerry Spinelli

We couldn't say her name often enough. It tickled us to mention her name to strangers and watch the expressions on their faces.
Girls liked her. Boys liked her. And
most remarkable
the attention came from all kinds of kids: shy mice and princesses, jocks and eggheads. — Jerry Spinelli

Each night I lie down in a graveyard of memories. Moonlight spins a shroud about me. — Jerry Spinelli

I thought of the stone angel. I pictured the snow falling over it, two classes of snow rising on the top of its wings. So silent, the both of them, the angel and the snow. I pretended I was the stone angel. I close my eyes and pretended as hard as I could, and after a while I was convinced I could feel wings sprouting from my shoulders. I wanted to look, to see my wings, but I was an angel stone, so I could not move. — Jerry Spinelli

Sometimes I try to erase myself. And then, if I've done a good job, I'm erased. I'm nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl. And I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I'm not outside my world anymore, and I'm not really inside it either. The thing is, there's no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. — Jerry Spinelli

War became less about machine-gun chatter and spectacular explosions and more about people. — Jerry Spinelli

Why do we wrap things? Usually to protect them. The more fragile they are, the more important the wrapping. Your dream is prey to many perils. It may shatter under the blows of criticism, evaporate with competition's heat, sink to the bottomless depths of others' indifference. Tend to your dream. Protect it as you would a fallen nestling. Until the day when it - and you - will fly. — Jerry Spinelli

It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans. — Jerry Spinelli

The sky was almost black. Distant rolling rumbles. Lightning flashed white in the kitchen.

(I had a goofy thought: Did God just take our picture?) — Jerry Spinelli

I didn't realize we were being watched. We were all being watched — Jerry Spinelli

I'm looking over a four-leaf clover that I overlooked before. — Jerry Spinelli

It seemed we were no longer separate, but were one. — Jerry Spinelli

And the trouble with bad times is, you can't sleep through them. — Jerry Spinelli

Of all the unusual features of Stargirl, this struck me as the most remarkable. Bad things did not stick to her. Correction: her bad things did not stick to her. If we were hurt, if we were unhappy or otherwise victimized by life, she seemed to know about it, and to care, as soon as we did. But bad things falling on her
unkind words, nasty stares, foot blisters
she seemed unaware of. I never saw her look in a mirror, never heard her complain. All of her feelings, all of her attentions flowed outward. She had no ego. — Jerry Spinelli

Stargirl began to improvise. She flung her arms to a make-believe crowd like a celebrity on parade. She waggled her fingers at the stars. She churned her fists like an egg-beater. Every action echoed down the line behind her. The three hops of the bunny became three struts of a vaudeville vamp. Then a penguin waddle. Then tippy-toed priss. Every new move brought new laughter from the line. — Jerry Spinelli

She turned left when everyone else turned right. — Jerry Spinelli

I love beginnings. If I were in charge of calendars, every day would be January 1. And — Jerry Spinelli

She dreams a lot. She dreams of Ondines and falling maidens and houses burning in the night. But search her dreams all you like and you'll never find Prince Charming. No knight on a white horse gallops into her dreams to carry her away. When she dreams of love, she dreams of smashed potatoes. — Jerry Spinelli

I felt alone on the planet, drifting through the cosmos. With both hands I reached out to the night. There was no answer. Or maybe I just couldn't hear it. — Jerry Spinelli

No matter what day it is, no matter what time, no matter where I am - I'm always at the star party, staring at the slhouette on the crest of the hill, whishing that one dark shape would split in two. But it never does. — Jerry Spinelli

Strange territory for me: the after-snap. I still feel myself vibrating. Humming. — Jerry Spinelli

There's nothing sadder than a sobbing waffle. — Jerry Spinelli

The horizontal world I had thought I occupied was tilting, dumping me somewhere else, somewhere new. — Jerry Spinelli

My happy wagon is almost empty, Leo. Only five pebbles left. Happywise, I'm operating on only 25 percent capacity. Remember when I first showed my wagon to you? How many pebbles were in it then? Seventeen? And then I put another in, remember? I never told you this, but before I went to bed that night, after we kissed for the first time on the sidewalk outside my house, I put in the last two pebbles. Twenty. Total happiness. For the first time ever. It stayed that way until I painted that big sign on a sheet and hung it outside the school for all the world to see ... — Jerry Spinelli

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up. — Jerry Spinelli

Everybody has an angel hiding inside. When you die, your angel comes out. You can die, but not your angel. Your angel never dies. — Jerry Spinelli

Who are you?' I didn't understand the question. I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?' I gave him my name. 'Stopthief. — Jerry Spinelli

Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement. — Jerry Spinelli

Love is big. Love makes room for conflicting feelings. — Jerry Spinelli

So," he said, "we ourselves will be the candle flames." He put his hands on his chest. "Feel your hearts, how warm they are. — Jerry Spinelli

I don't really write for adults or kids - I don't write for kids, I write about them. I think you need to do that; otherwise, you end up preaching down. You need to listen not so much to the audience but to the story itself. — Jerry Spinelli

You are truly focused when you're so focused that you don't know you're focused. — Jerry Spinelli

Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story. — Jerry Spinelli

At the same time, we held back. Because she was different. Different. We had no one to compare her to, no one to measure her against. — Jerry Spinelli

So many careers came and went through me:
salamander finder, crawfish annoyer, flat-stone creek skipper, cedar chest smeller, railroad car counter, tin can stomper, milkweed blower, mulberry picker, snowball smoother, paper bag popper, steel rail walker, box turtle toucher, dark-sky watcher, best part saver. They didn't last long, these careers of mine, but flashed into and out of existence like mayflies. But while they employed me, I gave them an honest minute's work and was paid in the satisfactions of curiosity met and a job well done. — Jerry Spinelli

Because life doesn't always happen according to a timetable or calendar. And feelings can't be scheduled. — Jerry Spinelli

So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was along, a parade of one. — Jerry Spinelli

He just did it for the same reason he does everything else - he felt like it. — Jerry Spinelli

How do you not try to get something you want?
How do you stop caring about the thing that you care about the most?
How do you erase the other half of your own self? — Jerry Spinelli

Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart. — Jerry Spinelli

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts. — Jerry Spinelli

August 21.
... I've become pretty good at telling weeds fom not-weeds. But every once in a while I have my doubts. I come across an especially difficult root. I pull and it doesn't come out. I pull again. It resists. I dig my gloved fingers into the soil and grab it with both hands and pull yet again. It begins to come out, but I can see it's going to take several more hard pulls. And that's when the doubts begin. I begin to wonder: Have I made a mistake? Is this really a weed? If it's not supposed to be here, why is it resisting so? But it's too late now. There's nothing to do with a plant half pulled but to go all the way. And so I tug some more, and finally, shedding clods of dirt and worms, it breaks free of the earth---and I try not to hear the tiny, anguished cry. — Jerry Spinelli

And smiles to go before I weep, And Smiles to go before I weep. — Jerry Spinelli

She's alone, they kept telling themselves, and surely she danced in no one's arms, yet somehow that seemed to matter less and less. As the night went on, and clarinet and coyote call mingled beyond the lantern light, the magic of their own powder-blue jackets and orchids seemed to fade, and it came to them in small sensations that they were more alone than she was. — Jerry Spinelli

Every day brings a new memory of something we did a year ago. A parade of unhappy anniversaries. — Jerry Spinelli

It was like the panting of a thousand puppies. — Jerry Spinelli

And the more you love someone, the safer it is to be mad at them. Love can handle mad, no problem. — Jerry Spinelli

Nothing's more fun than being carried away. — Jerry Spinelli

His nostrils flared, he was breathing like a picadored bull. — Jerry Spinelli

Friendship isn't always sunnyside up. — Jerry Spinelli

When's the next star party?"
"Spring"
"Spring. Long time to wait."
"The sky's not going anywhere. — Jerry Spinelli

Who doesn't love a compliment? But every compliment comes with a warning: Beware - Do Not Overuse. Go ahead, sniff your compliment. Take a little sip. But don't chew, don't swallow. If you do, you risk abandoning the good work that inspired the compliment in the first place. If that happens, maybe it was the compliment and not the job well done that you were aiming for all along. — Jerry Spinelli

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year. — Jerry Spinelli

If you start by hating one or two people, you won't be able to stop. Pretty soon you'll hate a hundred people."
"A zillion?"
"Even a zillion. A little hatred goes a long, long way. It grows and grows. And it's hungry."
"Like Cimmamum?"
"Even hungrier. You keep feeding it more and more people, and the more it gets, the more it wants. It's never satisfied. And pretty soon it squeezes all the love out of your heart"
I pointed to her heart; she looked down at her chest
"and all you'll have left is a hateful heart. — Jerry Spinelli

Her smile put the sunflower to shame. — Jerry Spinelli

If I get a new idea today - or any day - I won't run from it. I won't trash it. If it's something I really want to do - I'll do it. — Jerry Spinelli

but my rather said no way was he going — Jerry Spinelli

When bad things turn good, the reason can usually be found in the human heart - sometimes in the hearts of great masses of people, sometimes in the heart of a solitary soul. — Jerry Spinelli

Angels and crows passed each other, one leaving, the other coming. — Jerry Spinelli

There are bits and pieces of me probably in every one of my 35 or so books. — Jerry Spinelli

Give me a minute,' I told her. I sat on the cold, clumpy ground. I turned my back on the smudgy sunrise so that I was facing west, facing you. I closed my eyes and I did something I've been thinking about: I sent you a message. A question. I hope you receive it.
Then I got up and we left. — Jerry Spinelli

OK, so you're not perfect. Who is? — Jerry Spinelli

To a person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there's no sand. At least not the sort of sand you find at the beach. The ground does have a sandy color to it, or gray, but your feet won't sink in. It's hard, as if it's been tamped. And pebbly. And glinting with
what else
mica. — Jerry Spinelli

Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain. — Jerry Spinelli

You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day. It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. — Jerry Spinelli

Even including myself, my favorite author is Eileen Spinelli, who I happen to live with. She's a terrific writer and has written several of my all-time favorites. — Jerry Spinelli

Most people are looking for a challenging, interesting job. I wanted a boring, undemanding job so that I could forget about it at 5, so that I would have something left over at the end of the day to do my own stuff. — Jerry Spinelli

It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life ... It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against. For ourselves. For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long. — Jerry Spinelli

His smile was so wide he'd have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway — Jerry Spinelli