Paterson Quotes

We sit and talk, quietly, with long lapses of silence and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes which has no speech

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

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

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

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

Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.

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

It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading. Something that will stretch their imaginations- something that will help them make sense of their own lives and encourage them to reach out toward people whose lives are quite different from their own.

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

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

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.

Just close your eyes and keep your mind wide open.

Shh," he said. "Look." "Where?" "Can't you see'um?" he whispered. "All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you." "Me?" "Shh, yes. There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arrving today might be the queen they've been waiting for.

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

All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.

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.

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

If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?

You're the proverbial diamond in the rough.

Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.

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

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.

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

We need a place," she said, "just for us. It would be so secret that we would never tell anyone in the whole world about it." ... She lowered her voice almost to a whisper. "It might be a whole secret country," she continued, "and you and I would be the rulers of it.

a dream without a plan is just a wish

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

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

That was the rule that you never mixed up troubles at home with life at school. When parents were poor or ignorant or mean, or even just didn't believe in having a TV set, it was up to their kids to protect them.

There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.

My heart is heavy, she thought. It’s not just a saying. It is what is—heavy, a great stone lodged in my breast, pressing down my whole being. How can I even stand straight and look out upon the world? I am doubled over into myself and, for all the weight, find only emptiness.

Peace is not won by those who fiercely guard their differences, but by those who with open minds and hearts seek out connections.

It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king. He had thought that was it. Wasn't king the best you could be? Now it occurred to him that perhaps Terabithia was like a castle where you came to be knighted. After you stayed for a while and grew strong you had to move on. For hadn't Leslie, even in Terabithia, tried to push back the walls of his mind and make him see beyond to the shining world—huge and terrible and beautiful and very fragile? (Handle with care—everything—even the predators.) Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn't there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength. As for the terrors ahead—for he did not fool himself that they were all behind him—well, you just have to stand up to your fear and not let it squeeze you white. Right, Leslie? Right.

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

The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech-- is, of necessity, my sole concern.

It wasn't so much that he minded telling Leslie that he was afraid to go; it was that he minded being afraid. It was as though he had been made with a great piece missing - one of May Belle's puzzles with this huge gap where somebody's eye should have been. Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

Miss Edmunds was one of his secrets. He was in love with her. Not the kind of silly stuff Ellie and Brenda giggled about on the telephone. This was too real and too deep to talk about, even to think about very much.

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

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

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

I don't care. I don't care". He was crying now, crying so hard he could barely breathe.

Someday, when he was good enough, he would ask her to write them in a book and let him do all the pictures.

Church always seemed the same. Jess could tune it out the same way he tuned out school, with his body standing up and sitting down in unison with the rest of the congregation but his mind numb and floating, not really thinking or dreaming but at least free.

Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.

The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.

If life is so bad, how come you’re so happy?” “Did I say bad? I said it was tough. Nothing to make you happy like doing good on a tough job, now is there?

The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.

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

Poverty can be brought about by law; it cannot be forbidden by law.

Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey.

Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body.

Leslie was one of those people who sat quietly at her desk, never whispering or daydreaming or chewing gum, doing beautiful schoolwork, and yet her brain was so full of mischief that if the teacher could have once seen through that mask of perfection, she would have thrown her out in horror.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.

. . . Jess believed, that she thought he was the best. It was not the kind of best that counted either at school or at home, but it was a genuine kind of best. He kept the knowledge of it buried inside himself like a pirate treasure. He was rich, very rich, but no one could know about it for now except his fellow outlaw, Julia Edmunds.

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

I love revisions…We can’t go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Say it! No ideas but in things.

But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz--God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.

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

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

The military state is the final form to which every planned economy tends rapidly.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Lord, it would be better to be born without an arm than to go through life with no guts.

All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.

How could he explain it in a way Leslie would understand, how he yearned to reach out and capture the quivering life about him and how when he tried, it slipped past his fingertips, leaving a dry fossil upon the page?

Right now it is a terrible thing to be a rugged individualist; but we don't know what else to be except a feeble nonentity.

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

I will arise," he replied with dignity, "when thou removes this fool dog off my gut.

Handle with care - everything - even the predators.

Books like friends should be few and well-chosen.

Don't tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don't need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you're after, my dear.

I 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.

Leslie named their secret land “Terabithia,” and she loaned Jess all of her books about Narnia, so he would know how things went in a magic kingdom—how the animals and the trees must be protected and how a ruler must behave.

She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it too late to go back, she had left him stranded there - like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.

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.

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence. Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive. ― William Carlos Williams, Paterson. (New Directions; Revised Edition edition April 17, 1995) Originally published 1946.

The chef who cooks without a song on his lips cannot hope to infuse the right carefree improvisatory note into his art.

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

Antes de que ocurra nunca sabes cómo va a ser una cosa realmente.

It was a three-dimensional nightmare version of some of his own drawings.

I ain’t got no blood claim on you, and the Lord in Heaven knows I want you to have a good life with your own people. But”—her huge bass voice broke up into little squeaky pieces—“but it’s killing me to see you go.

Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.

Ordinary people who walk with an extraordinary God of grace and power, really can make a difference in other as yet unreached lives.

Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read.

I can see exactly what not to do at the moment. No doubt through the usual process of elimination I'll arrive at my favourite strategy of total paralysis.

Jess tried going to Terabithia alone, but it was no good. It needed Leslie to make the magic.

Gee, I’m really glad I came.” Jess turned to Leslie in unbelief. “It was better than a movie.” “You’re kidding.” “No, I’m not.” And she wasn’t. He could tell by her face. “That whole Jesus thing is really interesting, isn’t it?” “What d’you mean?” “All those people wanting to kill him when he hadn’t done anything to hurt them.” She hesitated. “It’s really kind of a beautiful story—like Abraham Lincoln or Socrates—or Aslan.

...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)

Sometimes in the company of others I find a disagreeable spirit of competitiveness kicks in and each person is shamed into spending rather more than he would have wished. This is a historically established syndrome, of course. One Magus going to Bethlehem would probably have sprung for a box of After Eights. Three Magi on the same trip found themselves laden with gold, frankincense and myrrh and bitterly comtemplating their overdrafts.

On Decoration Day, while everyone else in town was at the cemetery decorating the graves of our Glorious War Dead, Willie Beaner and me, Robert Burns Hewitt, took Mabel Cramm's bloomers and run them up the flagpole in front of the town hall. That was the beginning of all my troubles.

I feel very silly saying to you, Tell me all about yourself, but I wish you would. I want to get to know you." That's not how you get to know people. Don't you know? You can't talk it out, you've got to live into their lives, bad and good. You'll know me soon enough. What I want you to know.

Bridge to Terabithia takes us by the hand and leads us into a room that we have never entered before. After we read this story, we cannot unknow what we now know. We are devastated, emotionally rent. But still: we feel held, loved, seen. Someone trusted us enough to tell us the truth; and because of that, the room is golden, brimful of light.

They ate a late lunch in the cafeteria. When she mentioned lunch, he realized with horror that he would need money, and he didn’t know how to tell her that he hadn’t brought any—didn’t have any to bring, for that matter. But before he had time to figure anything out, she said, “Now I’m not going to have any argument about whose paying. I’m a liberated woman, Jess Aarons. When I invite a man out, I pay.

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.

...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.

A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state...The most vindictive resentment may be expected from the pedagogic profession for any suggestion that they should be dislodged from their dictatorial position; it will be expressed mainly in epithets, such as "reactionary," at the mildest. Nevertheless, the question to put to any teacher moved to such indignation is: Do you think nobody would willingly entrust his children to you to pay you for teaching them? Why do you have to extort your fees and collect your pupils by compulsion?

What is man—and of course the writer means all of us puny little insignificant creatures—what is a mere human being that God who made the immense universe should ever notice?' She chuckled. 'The sky does take you down to size.' Not even big as bugs. Not even a speck of dust to the nearest star,' Angel agreed. But the psalmist answers his own question. "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor..." ' What?' Angel asked, not sure she had heard right. A little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.' The real angels? Do you believe that?' Yes, Angel, I do. When people look down on me, and these days'—she laughed shortly—'these days everyone over the age of five does. When people look down on me, I remember that God looks at this pitiful, twisted old thing that I have become and crowns me with glory.

—Qué va. —Hablaba en serio. Jess lo supo por su mirada—. Toda esa historia de Jesús es realmente interesante, ¿no te parece? —¿Qué quieres decir? —Toda aquella gente que quiso matarle sin que él les hubiera hecho nada. Vaciló. De verdad que era una historia preciosa: como la de Abraham Lincoln o Sócrates o Aslan. —No tiene nada de hermosa —interrumpió May Belle—. Da miedo eso de hacer agujeros en las manos de alguien. —Tienes razón, May Belle. —Jess buscó en las profundidades de su mente—. Dios hizo que Jesús muriera porque nosotros somos unos miserables pecadores. —¿Crees que eso es verdad? Se quedó atónito. —Lo dice la Biblia, Leslie. Le miró como si estuviera dispuesta a ponerse a discutir con él, pero luego pareció cambiar de opinión. —Qué locura, ¿verdad? —Leslie sacudió la cabeza—. Tú que tienes que creer en la Biblia, la odias. Y yo, que no tengo que creerla, la encuentro preciosa. —Volvió a sacudir la cabeza—. Es cosa de locos.