Fleischman Quotes & Sayings

Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity. — Paul Fleischman

Do what helps others.
Refrain from harming others.
Transcend your own ignorance, clinging, hate, fear and delusion.
This and only this is the dispensation of all the Buddhas. — Paul R. Fleischman

Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers. Children's books stay in print for decades. — Sid Fleischman

A fact bobbed up from my memory, that the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad. It was a mind-altering drug we took daily. — Paul Fleischman

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way. — Paul Fleischman

It was as big as a box kite and mounted on a pole, gesticulating wildly with moving arms, vanes, wheels, and propellers larger and small. I'd never seen it. It was all different colors. It didn't resemble anything in particular, except at the top, where there was a woman's head. Attached to her hair were three reflectors. Shells and chimes hung around her neck. Even with half the moving parts stuck, a gust blowing through it set off a flurry of fluttering and shimmering and ringing, as if a flock of exotic birds was taking flight. — Paul Fleischman

When we have no families, we must find support elsewhere. Sometimes in strangers. We're all alone on this earth. We must take any hand that's offered us. I offer you mine...I'll be your friend, if you wish. The faithful kind.

- Elva — Paul Fleischman

It was a figure of a whale, with a white triangle that was supposed to be its spray. The spray moved up and down above the blowhole. On top of the spray sat a black-haired woman. — Paul Fleischman

Jemmy dipped the quill in beet juice and continued scribbling. "I'll tell him you've got reserved seats in Hell."
"Aye! That's the ticket! — Sid Fleischman

Parents should keep 'Eyes Wide Open' next to the 'Kinsey Report' on their shelves. — Paul Fleischman

It was a girl playing a harp, like in an orchestra. It was in this tree at our campsite. And since it was breezy weather that weekend, the girl's arms were almost always turning. — Paul Fleischman

I don't see any reason to let law interfere with justice around here. We never did before. — Sid Fleischman

What was he looking for, a prince in fine velvets and a crown cocked on his head? Was it clothes that made a prince, Jemmy wondered, just as rags made a street boy? — Sid Fleischman

He desired to become the man he was impersonating. — Paul Fleischman

Words were a conjuration, and their charms had begun to bewitch him. — Sid Fleischman

What could be more exciting when the writing is going well and things are falling into place? It's just like riding a fabulous wave for a surfer. There's no better place to be. — Paul Fleischman

People don't like to be nagged. When people nag us, we instantly resist, but when the facts force us in that same direction, we instantly adapt. — Paul Fleischman

Give weather reports. It helps the reality of a scene if foghorns are blowing or kites are in the sky on a windy afternoon or the day's so hot wallpaper is peeling off the walls. — Sid Fleischman

Isn't that the essence of literature?...Our ability to identify with characters, no matter that they're separated from us by thousands of miles and hundreds of lifetimes. We may have no Mount Vesuvius looming over us. It may not be lava and ashes we fear. But we look at these forms, and we know what they felt. — Paul Fleischman

The human being is constantly torn from calm and peace of simple existence by two things; wanting what you don't have, or disliking what you have. — Paul Fleischman

I'm a very careful, slow writer, and I think a lot of that comes from the care required to be a hand-printer, where if something isn't spaced out enough, you take little slivers of brass or copper and put them between each letter. — Paul Fleischman

But determination can make the miraculous possible. — Paul Fleischman

I grew up in a house that might have had the only front-yard cornfield in all of Los Angeles. — Paul Fleischman

In my first story, 'Mr. Mysterious & Company' ... I was asked to take out some of the humor because editors were afraid reviewers would dismiss the book as a joke. Today, humor is enjoyed and no longer regarded as literary brummagem. — Sid Fleischman

[Community gardens] were oases in the urban landscape of fear, places where people could safely offer trust, helpfulness, charity, without need of an earthquake or hurricane...Community gardens are places where people rediscover not only generosity, but the pleasure of coming together. I salute all those who give their time and talents to rebuilding that sense of belonging. — Paul Fleischman

The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices ... But the garden's greatest benefit, I feel, as not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes sees our neighbors. — Paul Fleischman

I am Prince Horace!"
"And I'm the Grand Turnip of China!" cutwater snickered.
"Dim-witted villains!" shouted the Prince. "I command you to turn us loose. — Sid Fleischman

Radio listeners are voyeurs: lurking, invisible, eavesdropping. — Paul Fleischman

I actually went on a vegan diet. So I was nagging myself there. I don't nag other people about it. It was sort of an interesting experiment, and I found it wasn't that hard at all. — Paul Fleischman

Mindfulness, as defined by the Buddha, means awareness of incessant change, of arising and vanishing, inside of your own body, which is the ultimate reality of your own life. — Paul Fleischman

The sidewalk was completely empty. It was Sunday, early April. An icy wind teetered trash cans and turned my cheeks to marble. In Vietnam we had no weather like that. Here in Cleveland people call it spring. — Paul Fleischman

The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm. — Paul Fleischman

Warming is incontrovertible, so in general, you're going to have more droughts, more fires. So I think events like that are the best thing that could happen for righting our ship and getting us on a safer course. — Paul Fleischman

That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts. — Paul Fleischman

I came to that wooden marching band. I stopped and looked. There was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and drum. Birds don't live alone, I told myself. They live in flocks. Like people. People are always in a group. Like that little wooden band. — Paul Fleischman

Why do I need TV when I have forty-eight apartment windows to watch across the vacant lot, and a sliver of Lake Erie? I've seen history out this window. So much. I was four when we moved here in 1919. The fruit-sellers' carts and coal wagons were pulled down the street by horses back then. I used to stand just here and watch the coal brought up by the handsome lad from Groza, the village my parents were born in. Gibb Street was mainly Rumanians back then. It was "Adio" - "Good-bye"- in all the shops when you left. Then the Rumanians started leaving. They weren't the first, or the last. This has always been a working-class neighborhood. It's like a cheap hotel - you stay until you've got enough money to leave. — Paul Fleischman

Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book. — Sid Fleischman

The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever
they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work. — Sid Fleischman

Joy was not the raw material of humor ... The dark source was sorrow. — Sid Fleischman

Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then. — Frederick Buechner

You can't see Canada across lake Erie, but you know it's there. It's the same with spring. You have to have faith, especially in Cleveland. — Paul Fleischman

The few words of a title are the hardest words for any author to come up with. — Paul Fleischman

As an adult, I'll give a writer 50 pages. If the book doesn't interest me in 50 pages, I'll say the heck with it - there are just too many other things to read. A child won't give you 50 pages. — Sid Fleischman

She was in trouble, and she passed it on to me like an infection and standing here in the rain I didn't give a damn. — A.S. Fleischman

There's plenty about my life I can't change. Can't bring the dead back to life on this earth. Can't make the world loving and kind. Can't change myself into a millionaire. But a patch of ground in this trashy lot -- I can change that. Can change it big. Better to put my time into that than moaning about the other all day. — Paul Fleischman

Science explains what nature is doing; money often explains what we're doing. — Paul Fleischman

The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching. — Paul Fleischman

the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad. — Paul Fleischman

Brent suddenly thought back to Miss Gill, the mediator in Chicago, and her saying the effects of an act traveled far beyond one's knowledge. He knew she'd meant harmful acts, like his. He saw now that the same could be said for good deeds-good, bad, and indifferent-sent a wave rolling out of sight. He wondered what his own accounting, generations later, would look like. — Paul Fleischman

I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches. — Sid Fleischman

I am astonished, when I pause to think about it, to discover myself to be an author of humorous novels for children. Or an author at all. I had a childhood much like everyone else's. What went wrong? — Sid Fleischman

If love is real, doesn't it then last forever? Why? Life is real, and it doesn't last either — Lisa Huang Fleischman

A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice. — Paul Fleischman