Katherine Paterson

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

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

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. 

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.

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.

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.