Blue Balliett Quotes

Dig down, fly high, remember where you want to go, and one day you'll get there: Roots + Wings + Dreams=Home!

I don't know how anyone else sees the world and no one else sees the world exactly how I see the world! We each see in our own, unique way.

People get distracted by worries and sadness, and have to struggle to see anything else. They have to work hard to hold on to beauty, to hold fast to dreams and words

In the summer, it's short greens and tall greens and sometimes a smudge of other colors. In winter, it's squinty white,and sometimes deep when it looks flat. In early spring and late fall, the town gets brown and black, like an old photograph.

Well?" the man shouted. "With or against?" No one replied, and

Be a squeaky wheel but talk nice

Inside this building, the world had felt generous, limitless, like a safe spot for dreams to grow.

My grandpa and grandma aren't like me. They're more like sheets drying outside on a breezy day
they change directions without any fuss. But me, if I was a sheet and the wind blew me, I'd never stop flapping.

Perhaps Calder's secret lies in the idea that each mobile is, truly, a metaphor for the experience of living, for the interconnected movement of separate elements that make up a life. Each mobile tells us to stop, to wonder, to wonder some more, and to celebrate.

Picasso said that art is a lie, but a lie that tells the truth ... Calder wondered what Picasso had meant. Was it that art wasn't exactly the real world, but it said something real?

Yes, the wind came up
" Mrs. Sharpe began. She paused.
"And changed us all," Petra said softly.

Reading is a tool no one can take away. A million bad things may happen in life and it'll still be with you, like a flashlight that never needs a battary. Reading can offer a crack of light on the blackest of nights.

Language was a code, like numbers, he said, and depended just as much on rhythm for its power

Crash, from the Russian krashenina Noun: a rough fabric sometimes used to strengthen the spine of a book

I love the way a list makes a big hodgepodge of things simmer down and behave.

Grams calls them "worry crumbs" those leftover bits of an uncomfortable idea. She fixes worry crumbs with sayings and she has one to fit almost any size mess or confusion.

What was a little dark, anyway? Just no sun, [Petra] reminded herself as her sneakers pounded toward the opening. Just dark, all three fine, she whispered to herself again and again, spinning the words outward into a mobile in her mind. They floated into dark-three, all-just-fine and then into all-fine, dark-just-three.

Depending on how you look at things. Your world could change completely. His thought, was that most people bend over backwards to fit everything that happened to them into something that they could understand. In other words, people some times twisted what was actually in front of them to fit what they they thought should be there, and never even realize they were doing it. People like to see what they were supposed to see and find what they were supposed to find.

What was a foreigner, anyway? Is the place you're born the only place you really belong? At what point do you stop being from "away" and start being from "here"?

Not really a quote but here is is
The setting is the start.The story hangs from that hook,and the characters move slowly around one another.
Each piece has its own shape and size.
The characters think they see the wires that connect them.
But that isn't possible.
Or is it?
Who makes the rules?

She wouldn't be helpless, not ever, not if she could see a way out. She wouldn't allow that to happen. She could see that being helpless in a situation like this was dangerously close to becoming just plain less

The more you search the more you find.

and gave her a thank-goodness hug

You could pick out what felt surprising in a book or poem and then save it, as long as you also wrote down the name of the person who wrote it first

Every book is a box of ideas.