Richard Peck

“Read to your childrenTwenty minutes a day;You have the time,And so do they.Read while the laundry is in the machine;Read while the dinner cooks;Tuck a child in the crook of your armAnd reach for the library books.Hide the remote,Let the computer games cool,For one day your children will be off to school;Remedial? Gifted? You have the choice;Let them hear their first talesIn the sound of your voice.Read in the morning;Read over noon;Read by the light ofGoodnight Moon.Turn the pages together,Sitting close as you'll fit,Till a small voice beside you says,"Hey, don't quit.”

“This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.”

“Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.”

“Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.”

“Conformity is the enemy of friendship”

“Blue lightning flashed in the kitchen, and for a split second you could see every calendar on the wall in there. Than an almighty explosion like the crack of doom. She'd rolled a cherry bomb across the floor, and it went off right under the eight feet of the Cowgill brothers, the three big bruisers and Ernie.”

“And I'll tell you something else for free. If you set a foot over that doorsill, I'll wring your red neck.”

“The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.”

“If you're going to read minds, start with a simple one.”

“I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready”

“Because nobody but a reader ever became a writer.”

“Besdies, to turn me ladylike might have rendered me useless and possibly ornamental.”

“If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.”

“Only the nonreader fears books. ”

“That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.”

“The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.”

“Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.”

“We write by the light of every story we have ever read. ”

“[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.”

“...they'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they?...Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.”

“Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.”

“Grandma, how old is she?""Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.”

“But put two librarians' heads together, and mountains move.”

“I read because one life isn't enough. ”

“I read.. because one life is not enough”

“September 11We thought we'd outdistanced historyTold our children it was nowhere near;Even when history struck Columbine,It didn't happen here.We took down the maps in the classroom,And when they were safely furled,We told the young what they wanted to hear,That they were immune from a menacing world.But history isn't a folded-up map,Or an unread textbook tome;Now we know history's a fireman's childWaiting at home alone.”