Katherine Paterson
From author's website:
People are always asking me questions I don't have answers for. One is, "When did you first know that you wanted to become a writer?" The fact is that I never wanted to be a writer, at least not when I was a child, or even a young woman. Today I want very much to be a writer. But when I was ten, I wanted to be either a movie star or a missionary. When I was twenty, I wanted to get married and have lots of children.
Another question I can't answer is, "When did you begin writing?" I can't remember. I know I began reading when I was four or five, because I couldn't stand not being able to. I must have tried writing soon afterward. Fortunately, very few samples of my early writing survived the eighteen moves I made before I was eighteen years old. I say fortunately, because the samples that did manage to survive are terrible, with the single exception of a rather nice letter I wrote to my father when I was seven. We were living in Shanghai, and my father was working in our old home territory, which at the time was across various battle lines. I missed him very much, and in telling him so, I managed a piece of writing I am not ashamed of to this day.
A lot has happened to me since I wrote that letter. The following year, we had to refugee a second time because war between Japan and the United States seemed inevitable. During World War II, we lived in Virginia and North Carolina, and when our family's return to China was indefinitely postponed, we moved to various towns in North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, before my parents settled in Winchester, Virginia.
By that time, I was ready to begin college. I spent four years at King College in Bristol, Tennessee, doing what I loved best-reading English and American literature-and avoiding math whenever possible.
My dream of becoming a movie star never came true, but I did a lot of acting all through school, and the first writing for which I got any applause consisted of plays I wrote for my sixth-grade friends to act out.
On the way to becoming a missionary, I spent a year teaching in a rural school in northern Virginia, where almost all my children were like Jesse Aarons. I'll never forget that wonderful class. A teacher I once met at a meeting in Virginia told me that when she read Bridge to Terabithia to her class, one of the girls told her that her mother had been in that Lovettsville sixth grade. I am very happy that those children, now grown up with children of their own, know about the book. I hope they can tell by reading it how much they meant to me.
After Lovettsville, I spent two years in graduate school in Richmond, Virginia, studying Bible and Christian education; then I went to Japan. My childhood dream was, of course, to be a missionary to China and eat Chinese food three times a day. But China was closed to Americans in 1957, and a Japanese friend urged me to go to Japan instead. I remembered the Japanese as the enemy. They were the ones who dropped the bombs and then occupied the towns where I had lived as a child. I was afraid of the Japanese, and so I hated them. But my friend persuaded me to put aside those childish feelings and give myself a chance to view the Japanese in a new way.
If you've read my early books, you must know that I came to love Japan and feel very much at home there. I went to language school, and lived and worked in that country for four years. I had every intention of spending the rest of my life among the Japanese. But when I returned to the States for a year of study in New York, I met a young Presbyterian pastor who changed the direction of my life once again. We were married in 1962.
I suppose my life as a writer really began in 1964. The Presbyterian church asked me to write some curriculum materials for fifth- and sixth-graders. Since the church had given me a scholarship to study and I had married instead of going back to work in Japan, I felt I owed them something for their m
“The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.”
“A novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.”
“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.”
“The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.”
“I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.”
“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.”
“You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like.”
“You think it's so great to die and make everyone cry and carry on. Well it ain't.”
“It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.”
“He may not have been born with guts, but he didn't have to die without them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“a dream without a plan is just a wish”
“I think," she began quietly, "I think we want... not just bread for our bellies. We want more than only bread. We want food for our hearts, our souls. We want- how to say it? We want, you know- Puccini music.... we want for our beautiful children some beauty." She leaned over and kissed the curl on her finger. "We want roses....”
“—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.”
“Allí, en su lugar secreto, sus sentimientos hervían dentro de él como un guisado en la lumbre; algunos eran tristes por su soledad, pero también había rastros de felicidad. Poder ser su único amigo en el mundo como ella lo era para él, le llenaba de satisfacción.”
“Antes de que ocurra nunca sabes cómo va a ser una cosa realmente.”
“Corría como si para ella fuera algo natural. Recordó el vuelo de los patos salvajes en otoño. Igual de fluido y uniforme. Le vino a la cabeza la palabra «hermosa» pero la rechazó y apresuró el paso hacia casa.”
“life ain't supposed to be nothing, 'cept maybe tough”
“I had no study in those days, not even a desk or file or bookcase to call mine alone....It might have happened sooner [the writing of work worthy of publication] had I had a room of my own and fewer children, but somehow I doubt it. For as I look back on what I have written, I can see that the very persons who took away my time and space are those who have given me something to say.”
“Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Sitting in cold wet britches for an hour was no fun even in a magic kingdom.”
“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.”
“Everything comes in useful once in a hundred years.”
“Everybody is somebobdy and I chanllenge anybody to deny it.”
“Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.”
“Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Sometimes you have to favor your heel, even if it means you're hurting your toe.”
“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.”
“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?”
“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.”
“You have to believe it and you hate it. I don't have to and I think it's beautiful.”
“We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.”
“I just can't get the poetry of the trees," he said.”
“We're alike, Jess would tell himself, me and Miss Edmunds . . . We don't belong at Lark Creek, Julia and me.”
“. . . 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don't have to be ashamed.”
“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.”
“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.”