Katherine Paterson
Katherine Paterson
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson is a Chinese-born American writer best known for children's novels. For four different books published 1975-1980, she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of three people to win the two major international awards; for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998 and for her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" she won the Astrid Lindgren...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth31 October 1932
CityHuai'an, China
CountryUnited States of America
A library is a feast to which we are all invited.
Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.
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.
If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.
If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?
Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.
Teachers have almost stopped reading aloud to their classes because of the pressure of testing and tight curricula, but it is the books we read together and talk about together that bring us closer together.
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.
I have been mocked by beauty, too. But it was the beauty which cost me nothing that in the end turned upon me.
Mandarin ducks mate for life and will die of loneliness if separated from their chosen mate.
It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
Death is very mysterious to us. One moment someone is there with us, and the next moment they're not.