Paul Fleischman Quotes

Brent suddenly thought back to Miss Gill, the mediator in Chicago, and her saying the effects of an act traveled far beyond one's knowledge. He knew she'd meant harmful acts, like his. He saw now that the same could be said for good deeds-good, bad, and indifferent-sent a wave rolling out of sight. He wondered what his own accounting, generations later, would look like.

A picture tells a thousand words. But you get a thousand pictures from someone's voice.

I'm a very careful, slow writer, and I think a lot of that comes from the care required to be a hand-printer, where if something isn't spaced out enough, you take little slivers of brass or copper and put them between each letter.

The red-jacketed band stirred to life. The first musician raised his trumpet. The trombone dipped. The drumstick rose. Lea lowered her clarinet. It had been Brent's idea not to have their insturments rise and fall in unison. The staggered motion gave it a more exciting rhythm.

I actually went on a vegan diet. So I was nagging myself there. I don't nag other people about it. It was sort of an interesting experiment, and I found it wasn't that hard at all.

But determination can make the miraculous possible.

He desired to become the man he was impersonating.

When we have no families, we must find support elsewhere. Sometimes in strangers. We're all alone on this earth. We must take any hand that's offered us. I offer you mine...I'll be your friend, if you wish. The faithful kind.

- Elva

Warming is incontrovertible, so in general, you're going to have more droughts, more fires. So I think events like that are the best thing that could happen for righting our ship and getting us on a safer course.

[Community gardens] were oases in the urban landscape of fear, places where people could safely offer trust, helpfulness, charity, without need of an earthquake or hurricane...Community gardens are places where people rediscover not only generosity, but the pleasure of coming together. I salute all those who give their time and talents to rebuilding that sense of belonging.

The few words of a title are the hardest words for any author to come up with.

Television, I'm afraid, has isolated us more than race, class, or ethnicity.

Science explains what nature is doing; money often explains what we're doing.

It was a girl playing a harp, like in an orchestra. It was in this tree at our campsite. And since it was breezy weather that weekend, the girl's arms were almost always turning.

That small circle of earth became a second home to both of us. Gardening boring? Never! It has surprise, tragedy, startling developments - a soap opera growing out of the ground. I'd forgotten that tremolo of expectation produced by a tiny forest of sprouts.

I came to that wooden marching band. I stopped and looked. There was a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, and drum. Birds don't live alone, I told myself. They live in flocks. Like people. People are always in a group. Like that little wooden band.

The word "paradise" came out of my mouth, without thinking.

The human being is constantly torn from calm and peace of simple existence by two things; wanting what you don't have, or disliking what you have.

Mindfulness, as defined by the Buddha, means awareness of incessant change, of arising and vanishing, inside of your own body, which is the ultimate reality of your own life.

the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad.

The whirligig featured a drummer, a trumpet player, a clarinetist, and a man with a trombone. It was a leap beyond the spouting whale, with more figures, a six-bladed propeller, and a much more complex system of rods and pivots that made the instruments dip and rise as if the musicians were marching.

Radio listeners are voyeurs: lurking, invisible, eavesdropping.

People don't like to be nagged. When people nag us, we instantly resist, but when the facts force us in that same direction, we instantly adapt.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

The sidewalk was completely empty. It was Sunday, early April. An icy wind teetered trash cans and turned my cheeks to marble. In Vietnam we had no weather like that. Here in Cleveland people call it spring.

I grew up in a house that might have had the only front-yard cornfield in all of Los Angeles.