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
Impressed. Lord. He had nearly drowned.
...I just gave up trying to be a Christian... Let's face it, I ain't got the knack for holiness. Besides, I didn't have the slightest little desire to join the likes of Reverend Pelham at the dinner table for fourteen minutes, much less at the banquet table of Heaven eternally. Eternity is a mighty long time to be stuck with people who judge every word you say and think and condemn most of what you do. It struck me as pretty miserable company. And if Reverend Pelham was the kind of company God preferred to keep, well, I just hoped they'd be happy together.
We all learn here by the honorable path of horrible mistakes.
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.
The last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything.
It's like the smarter you are, the more things can scare you.
It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.
We do have trouble dealing with death, but it's the one thing that is guaranteed we are all going to have to do, and we are going to have to face it many times before we die ourselves.
Youth is a mortal wound.
A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning.
All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.
The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.
Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.