Mass Quotes #10
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
“We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”
-Charles Wallace, Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door
“When I was called to you,” Gaudior corrected. “And When is not what matters. It’s what happens in the When that matters.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
“Questions, questions.” Gaudior stomped one silver hoof. “I am not some kind of computer. Only machines have glib answers for everything.”
-Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
The author determines the text; the reader determines its meaning.
-John Green
“Let’s face it Aaron, we’re just too different: You like Stephen Hawking. I like Stephen King. You know it would never have worked.”
-Mel, Meg Cabot, The Boy Next Door
“You cannot imagine how time…can be…so still.
It hangs. It weighs. And yet there is so little of it.
It goes so slowly, and yet it is so scarce.”
-Margaret Edson, Wit
“Of course,” Brigitte said. “Adults have big, big wishes that we do not expect to come true. That is why we need so many more candles on our cakes.”
-Susan Patron, Lucky Breaks
Mass Quotes #4
Today’s my last day of summer school, so hopefully I’ll be able to update this more often again. The good thing about summer school though is that I read a ton of amazing books for my children’s literature class, so I’ve got lots of new quotes for you. I’m waiting to take my children’s lit exam right now actually, so I don’t know how many I can post at the moment, but let’s find out.
“And even if you carry a survival kit around with you at all times, it won’t guarantee you’ll survive. No kit in the world can protect you from all the possible bad things.”
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
“The world is a wonderful place when you’re young.”
-Goose, E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“I don’t think it’s normal. You know perfectly well animals don’t talk.”
Mr. Arable grinned. “Maybe our ears aren’t as sharp as Fern’s,” he said.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
Time can play all sorts of tricks on you. In the blink of an eye, babies appear in carriages, coffins disappear into the ground, wars are won and lost, and children transform, like butterflies, into adults.
-Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret
Something was happening — no one was sure what. But out there back of beyond, far past the coastal ranges and the leagues of forest, the land changed and began opening to the sky.
-John Madson, Where the Sky Began
“Stand up and walk. Keep going forward. At least you have strong legs to take you there.”
-Ed, Hiromu Arakawa, Fullmetal Alchemist Vol 1
“But you will be faced now,” she explained gently, “with a pain of a magnitude that none of us here can comprehend because it is beyond our experience. The Receiver himself was not able to describe it, only to remind us that you would be faced with it, that you would need immense courage. We cannot prepare you for that.
“But we feel certain that you are brave,” she said to him.
-Lois Lowry, The Giver
Rules and Things Number 83: If an adult tells you not to worry, and you weren’t worried before, you better hurry up and start ’cause you’re already running late.
-Christopher Paul Curtis, Bud, Not Buddy
“But Grandmamma,” I said, “if nobody has ever seen The Grand High Witch, how can you be so sure she exists?”
My grandmother gave me a long and very severe look. “Nobody has ever seen the Devil,” she said,” but we know he exists.”
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
I found myself thinking, What’s so wonderful about being a little boy anyway? Why is that necessarily any better than being a mouse? I know that mice get hunted and they sometimes get poisoned or caught in traps. But little boys sometimes get killed, too. Little boys can be run over by motor-cars or they can die of some awful illness. Little boys have to go to school. Mice don’t. Mice don’t have to pass exams. Mice don’t have to worry about money. Mice, as far as I can see, have only two enemies, humans and cats. My grandmother is a human, but I know for certain she will always love me whoever I am. And she never, thank goodness, keeps a cat. When mice grow up, they don’t ever have to go to war and fight against other mice. Mice, I felt pretty certain, all like each other. People don’t.
-Roald Dahl, The Witches
If you’re looking for good reads this summer I highly recommend all of these (except for Where the Sky Began, that’s a boring book about the prairie I had to read for Eco). I’m having trouble deciding if my new favorite children’s book is The Witches, if it’s The Higher Power of Lucky, or if it will continue to be Through the Looking Glass. Probably Looking Glass, but the other two are definitely vying for second place.
Mass Quotes #3
Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.
-Lewis Carroll
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.”
-Lewis Carroll,
Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.
-E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
I am in earnest–I will not equivocate–I will not excuse–I will not retreat a single inch–and I will be heard.
-William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator
I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
-Frederick Douglas
Just the sound of those chimes made Lucky feel cooler. But she still had doubts and anxious questions in all the crevices of her brain, especially about how to find her Higher Power.
If she could only find it, Lucky was pretty sure she’d be able to figure out the difference between the things she could change and the things she couldn’t, like in the little prayer of the anonymous people. Because sometimes Lucky wanted to change everything, all the bad things that had happened, and sometimes she wanted everything to stay the same forever.
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
Then that sign that still said POP. 43 would really be wrong. But what Lucky wanted most was for that sign to stay the same forever, with no subtracting allowed.
-Susan Patron, The Higher Power of Lucky
