Paterson Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it. — Katherine Paterson

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end. — Don Paterson

The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others. — Isabel Paterson

Then Jess gave himself over to the numbness that was buzzing to be let out from a corner of his brain. — Katherine Paterson

Floyd Paterson and other fighters, they just don't take part.They make a million dollars, they get a Rolls Royce and a nice home and a white wife and think, 'well, I made it'. — Muhammad Ali

suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We — Katherine Paterson

The name we give to something shapes our attitude toward it. — Katherine Paterson

The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story. — Katherine Paterson

The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act. — Don Paterson

Daredevil nature as a young man. When I read what William Roth had written, I sighed. So that was where my own two boys had gotten the trait that was turning their mother's hair gray. — Katherine Paterson

To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another. — Katherine Paterson

Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child. — Katherine Paterson

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied. — Katherine Paterson

Critics all have this idea that authors inhabit another dimensional realm, right up to their first smack in the mouth - which feels to them quite miraculous, being their sex-dream come true. — Don Paterson

If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress. — Isabel Paterson

Paterson was not a member of the club. [..] When Paterson wanted to swim he took a towel and swam in the river naked and his Burmese boy stood on the bank with his bath-robe and waited to rub him down. 'I like to swim in water, not people,' was a remark of Paterson's that for a long time went round the club. — H.E. Bates

My writing comes from ideas that make a sound in my heart. — Katherine Paterson

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given. — Katherine Paterson

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state. — Isabel Paterson

Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them. — Don Paterson

No one is more keen than me to see the Hunting Act repealed, because I believe in the management of wildlife. — Owen Paterson

Race is the great taboo in our society. We are afraid to talk about it. White folks fear their unspoken views will be deemed racist. People of color are filled with sorrow and rage at unrighted wrongs. Drowning in silence, we are brothers and sisters drowning each other. Once we decide to transform ourselves from fearful caterpillars into courageous butterflies, we will be able to bridge the racial gulf and move forward together towards a bright and colorful future. — Eva Paterson

The work reveals the creator - and as our universe in its vastness, its orderliness, its exquisite detail, tells us something of the One who made it, so a work of fiction, for better or worse, will reveal the writer. — Katherine Paterson

As freak legislation, the antitrust laws stand alone. Nobody knows what it is they forbid. — Isabel Paterson

But he was long-legged for a ten-year-old, — Katherine Paterson

Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity. — Don Paterson

I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago. — Laura Mullen

When I'm invisible I don't have to feel anything. The pain and grief and fear goes away. I go numb and quiet. — Cecily Anne Paterson

God, Abby, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, he said as he stared out the bay window onto the lake. The serene morning calm of the water was laughing at his riptide of emotions. In all his life, he'd never been as tortured as he was now. Rip his limbs apart, whip his back raw, waterboard him, anything but this. Because this ... this was far worse. It was her pain. Her torture that was destroying his sanity. He had no control over it. He couldn't stop it.
He hated that he wasn't strong enough to withstand this. Most of all, he hated that he cared so much about her.
Cause he knew.
He knew one certainty in all this.
She had managed to touch a piece of his ice-cold heart. And it wasn't letting him go. — Cindy Paterson

A frightening number of whom had IQ scores in the low 70s? I stopped reading and just stuck the records out of sight in a bottom drawer of my desk, and never thought of them again until the end of the year when I was throwing away the accumulation of papers in my desk. I was furious with those scores. My kids were not dumb! I've never trusted standardized tests since. — Katherine Paterson

Newton was asked as a mathematician, not as a moralist. He replied 'Gentlemen, in applied mathematics, you must describe your unit. — Isabel Paterson

The number of 'act ive ingredients' involved in the occupational therapy process make it difficult to identify or predict factors influential in achieving or hindering the outcome (Creek et al., 2005; Paterson and Dieppe, 2005 — Anonymous

Cows ... weren't like people, with feelings of lonesomeness and worrying about what might happen next. That was just people, wasn't it? Sure, you could scare a cow, but wouldn't they get over it as soon as you let them be? They didn't stand around fretting about the next scare and the next and the next. — Katherine Paterson

We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story. And somehow, miraculously, a story that comes from deep in my heart calls from a reader that which is deepest in his or her heart, and together from our secret hidden selves we create a story that neither of us could have told alone. — Katherine Paterson

feeling of when you think you can never stop laughing and you think if you don't stop, you'll burst in half and that makes you laugh even more, thinking about bursting and then when you stop, you are so tired but it is such a happy tired. — Cecily Anne Paterson

Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not. — Katherine Paterson

We turn from the light to see. — Don Paterson

It's the principle of the thing, Jess . That's what you've got to understand. You have to stop people like that. Otherwise they turn into tyrants and dictators. — Katherine Paterson

The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify. — Katherine Paterson

Climate change is obviously happening and there is obviously a man-made contribution. — Owen Paterson

You gotta know someone cares about you, or you just give up. — Katherine Paterson

You have this thing called a life. It's only you that gets to live it and you only get to do it one time. — Cecily Anne Paterson

have to talk to Mr West. I'm sure he'll be able to help you.' 'We'll do that, Mrs Clegg,' replied Fitzjohn. 'Now, I don't want to keep you too much longer but Mr Van Goren arrived at the Observatory last evening in a taxi so I take it he didn't — Jill Paterson

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened. — Katherine Paterson

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

Books like friends should be few and well-chosen. — Samuel Paterson

Drive them out utterly, so they may never return and prey upon our people. — Katherine Paterson

What kind of world does the humanitarian contemplate as affording him full scope? It could only be a world filled with breadlines and hospitals, in which nobody retained the natural power of a human being to help himself or to resist having things done to him. And that is precisely the world that the humanitarian arranges when he gets his way. — Isabel Paterson

No law can give power to private persons; every law transfers power from private persons to government. — Isabel Paterson

Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all. — Katherine Paterson

I'm drowning my brother drowning. — Eva Paterson

The Municipal Councils in these areas excluded Chinese members, and the police and civil servants were foreigners. Even the names of the streets reflected foreign imperialism - such as Jessfield Road, on which St. Faith's was located. — Katherine Paterson

For all the pain I saw at Paterson, it is nothing compared to the pain that people inflict upon each other in the real world. All I can think of now is that it is not right for me to be unaware of that pain, including the pain that I inflict on others. Only how is it possible to live without being either numb to it or overwhelmed by it? — Francisco X Stork

Fuck, babe," Chocolate Eyes said, stepping forward. He grabbed her arm and hauled her to her feet off the tiled floor. "You look like crap ... worse, actually." He wiped her tears with the calloused pad of his thumb. "You want to get out of this pisshole or not? — Cindy Paterson

John softened, and many years later he said to me, "You know, if we were ever to divorce, I get the cat." There is a — Katherine Paterson

One of the novels that was hardest for me to write had to deal with the horrible slaughter of war. I almost didn't finish Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom for just that reason. — Katherine Paterson

...sometimes there are moments in your life that are more important than some of the other moments but that they can slip past you before you get a chance to look at them closely enough, the way a leaf sweeps past you in a river and disappears. — Donald Paterson

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos ... — Katherine Paterson

I had so looked forward to her walking." Maud carried her thirteen-month-old sister a few steps away and put her down on her feet. "Walk to Daddy," Maud said, and the baby threw out her arms and took the few steps across the space to her father's chair. — Katherine Paterson

A culinary triumph: the ingenious use of food as an offensive weapon. — James Hamilton-Paterson

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say. — Katherine Paterson

Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library. — Katherine Paterson

If Americans should now turn back, submit again to slavery, it would be a betrayal so base the human race might better perish. — Isabel Paterson

It's crazy isn't it?" She shook her head. "You have to believe it, but you hate it. I don't have to believe it, and I think it's beautiful." She shook her head again. "It's crazy. — Katherine Paterson

The great truth is that women actually like men, and men can never believe it. — Isabel Paterson

I was simultaneously elated and depressed, a common enough state of mind these days when people are offered a great deal of money to do something repugnant. — James Hamilton-Paterson

I enjoy getting to work on 'Saturday Night Live', where I get to do people like David Paterson. And then, its like a different muscle to do someone like a bicycle guy on' Portlandia'. — Fred Armisen

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

The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race. — Isabel Paterson

He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them. — Katherine Paterson

to my father's amazement, was an ancient but clearly recognizable painting of Marco Polo, who must have visited Huai'an during his thirteenth-century travels about China. The priest asked my father to donate a picture of Jesus for his collection, and, after thinking about it, Daddy did. — Katherine Paterson

The growth of the imagination demands windows-windows through which we can look out at the world and windows through which we can look into ourselves. The old stories were windows in just this way. — Katherine Paterson

Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time. — Don Paterson

We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds ... We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me. — Katherine Paterson

It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength. — Katherine Paterson

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

Books, like good friends, should be few and well chosen. SAMUEL PATERSON — John Keats

I got up the nerve to ask her if she remembered that first visit and my terrible faux pas. She pretended, in true Japanese fashion, that it had never happened. — Katherine Paterson

Jess followed, still trying to figure out why two grown people and a smart girl like Leslie wanted to leave a comfortable life in the suburbs for a place like this. They watched the bus roar off. — Katherine Paterson

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life. — Katherine Paterson

After a long period of reflection, he decided that he was in fact right yet again. — Don Paterson

Trade and money, which go together in a stream of energy, inevitably wash away the enclosing walls of a society of status. — Isabel Paterson

Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire. — Katherine Paterson

By stressing intrinsic value in thought. And it is true that when men have become engrossed in practical devices they are apt to narrow their field of vision and lose sight of the interconnection of the various branches of knowledge. More than that, as is now the case, they will even forget the larger principles they have applied, and on which their well-being depends. — Isabel Paterson

When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget ... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you. — Katherine Paterson

In each of the separate sections Mother would put a different treat - sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, watermelon seeds, sesame cookies, and peanuts. — Katherine Paterson

If you wanted to greet him or get his attention, you had to say: "Oh, Mr. Forest-Ranger-who-stands-in-the-tower-watching-out-for-forest fires!" If you abbreviated it, or, heaven help us, addressed him simply as "David," you would get no response. — Katherine Paterson

He nodded vigorously. Anything was better than promising to fight Janice Avery. — Katherine Paterson

Government should be a model of inclusion. — David Paterson

The moral, of course, is that you must always try to see other people's Point of View before you criticize anybody. Histories are crammed full of unkind things, silly things, and untrue things - why? Because so often the people who write them will not try to see or feel any Point of View but their own ... So mind that you always look out for the Point of View and help people to see yours, too, if you want them to understand you. — Katherine Paterson

Ain't 'cha gonna run?" she asked.
"No," he said, shoving the sheet away. "I'm gonna fly. — Katherine Paterson

The power to do things for people is also the power to do things to people. — Isabel Paterson

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

Jess wouldn't argue that, but he saw her as a beautiful wild creature who had been caught for a moment in that dirty old cage of a schoolhouse, perhaps by mistake. — Katherine Paterson

A novel is not born of a single idea. The stories I've tried to write from one idea, no matter how terrific an idea, have sputtered out and died by chapter three. For me, novels have invariably come from a complex of ideas that in the beginning seemed to bear no relation to each other, but in the unconscious began mysteriously to merge and grow. Ideas for a novel are like the strong guy lines of a spider web. Without them the silken web cannot be spun. — Katherine Paterson

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream? — Katherine Paterson

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything. — Katherine Paterson

I love everybody that's with me. All these dudes from Paterson - nothing happen to none of us. We won't go to jail. I make sure we don't. We don't stand on no corners. Ain't nobody carrying when they ain't supposed to be carrying. We don't pose with guns in the videos; we don't leave guns in the house. You'll never see Fetty Wap posting no videos with no guns. — Fetty Wap

She had nothing against any of the other guests, but once she started she saw no way to stop. There was nothing to do but turn the hose against every arriving guest. No one coming out of the house to reason with her was safe either. — Katherine Paterson

I like to write about a lot of things, which is why my books are different. This is probably why I don't like to write sequels, but chiefly I like to write about people. — Katherine Paterson