Youth is a mortal wound.

A dream without a plan is just a wish

Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.

Trouble can always be borne when it is shared.

Lord, let me heed the angels you put in my path.

A library is a feast to which we are all invited.

Hope ... is not a feeling; it is something you do.

Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.

life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough

What I really want to do is to write a hilarious farce.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

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

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

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

I was behaving, just like I promised, but fate intervened.

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

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

We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.

It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.

February is just plain malicious. It knows your defenses are down.

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

You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.

Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.

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

Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.

A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

It seems to me that there are two great enemies of peace - fear and selfishness.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.

You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.

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

I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.

The children's book world has given me wonderful friendships and an unbelievably rich life.

Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.

Some folks are natural born kickers. They can always find a way to turn disaster into butter.

Our fundamental task as human beings is to seek out connections-to exercise our imaginations.

Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.

Punch after punch after punch. February is a mean bully. Nothing could be worse - except August.

There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.

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

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

What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order.

The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

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

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.

I'm a great believer in research. I have to know about a place before I write a story that is set in that place.

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