Virginia Euwer Wolff Quotes & Sayings

He could add something to the list of things you weren't supposed to do. Don't get hurt, don't get dirty, don't get drunk, don't get scared, don't count on it. You ended up doing all of them. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

After clearing the land, planting the orchard, building the house and barn, and surviving the Great Depression, our father died suddenly one winter night when we were small, leaving us to learn about loss before we even knew its name. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

While I fold laundry I memorize things for school,
dates of wars:
French ones, African ones, Russian ones,
battles of all ugly kinds.
It's a shame to have us hopeful young students
learn these horrible things.
Exactly the kind of behaving
they have told us over and over again not to do
is what the history class is full of,
full-grown adults making these wars:
killing each other for land, for religions,
for greed and more greed,
Why bother to have children and educate them
and invent things to make their lives better,
just to send them off to war and get slaughtered? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Rise to the occassion which is life! — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I sure would like to get kissed.
How would that feel on my mouth,
How different would I be after,
a changed climate down in my insides? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I grew up in rural Oregon in a log house with bark left on inside and out. We had no electricity, a massive stone fireplace, a grand piano, and tons of books. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

If you dont like me, Walk away , Matter of fact Run Away — Virginia Euwer Wolff

A good book is never finished - -it goes on whispering to you from the wall. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one's own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

How many neighbors ignoring Jolly for her ignorance and bad luck could go down on their knees and save their kid from choking to death this afternoon while the world was going on outside in the sunshine? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

You ever laughed so hard
nobody in the world could hurt you for a minute,
no matter what they tried to do to you? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

One of the people on my Mom's Council,
he used to be a boxer.
My Mom always says he always says Get up on the 1.
You don't want them to count to 2
'cause then it's easy to count 3
while you go on being down. Always
Get up on the 1. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I've followed Brenda Bowen as she's moved from Henry Holt to Scholastic to Simon and Schuster to Hyperion and to HarperCollins. I have complete confidence that Brenda always knows the right questions to ask. I'm not sure another editor would be able to do that. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

We're so mixed up about religion in this culture. We say the Pledge of Allegiance, 'under God indivisible,' but there's no prayer in the schools. I would be so untethered without my personal faith. I wouldn't be able to go through a day - but that's my own experience. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

You get older and you are a whole mess of things, new thoughts, sorry feelings, big plans, enormous doubts, goling along hoping and getting disappointed, over and over again, no wonder I don't recognize my little crayon picture. It appears to be me and it is and it is not. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

My mother had no idea that her daughter would turn out to be a writer, but she would not let me go through a day of my childhood without music. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

No one writes as slowly as I do, I'm convinced. It's so hard for me. I learn slowly; I make decisions at a snail's pace. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I tell you this because books for young readers are so often written about that very moment: the moment of the fork. The moment the old man cannot return to. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Because I don't think I have a handle on how to write for grown-ups. The grown-up publishing world is so fraught with one-upsmanship, scorn and snobbery. I did write an adult novel. Thank goodness it went out of print. I think we kids' authors still start out with hope every morning. We honor our audience. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I work early in the morning, before my nasty critic gets up - he rises about noon. By then, I've put in much of a day's work. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction - so we are told. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

The teenage years are the years to examine faith - the need to be independent and the need to be anchored. Who made all this? And what do I have to do with it? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

If you want something to grow and be so beautiful you could have a nice day just from looking at it, you have to wait. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Some people make a bad bed, they just have to lie in it. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin. — Virginia Euwer Wolff