Richard Peck Quotes

We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

Grandma, how old is she?"
"Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.

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So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.

A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.

The sobs came then, faster than she could swallow. A teacher dares not cry, not a real teacher.

Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.

I read.. because one life is not enough

Read to your children Twenty minutes a day; You have the time, And so do they. Read while the laundry is in the machine; Read while the dinner cooks; Tuck a child in the crook of your arm And reach for the library books. Hide the remote, Let the computer games cool, For one day your children will be off to school; Remedial? Gifted? You have the choice; Let them hear their first tales In the sound of your voice. Read in the morning; Read over noon; Read by the light of Goodnight Moon. Turn the pages together, Sitting close as you'll fit, Till a small voice beside you says, Hey, don't quit.

She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.

Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds.

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.

We'd gotten him wrong. He wasn't a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he'd seen us all a good deal clearer than we'd ever seen him.

Blue lightning flashed in the kitchen, and for a split second you could see every calendar on the wall in there. Than an almighty explosion like the crack of doom. She'd rolled a cherry bomb across the floor, and it went off right under the eight feet of the Cowgill brothers, the three big bruisers and Ernie.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

At school we practiced for the Christmas program all month long. Miss Butler couldn't sing either, but she was a feisty director. . . . She took the Christmas program personally, as teachers do.

But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.

Besdies, to turn me ladylike might have rendered me useless and possibly ornamental.

This was something Grandma Tilly couldn't understand
how war promises a boy it can make a man out of him.

Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.

A solider must leave someone behind,' she said. 'What men do best is walk away from women. Wars are handy for that.

We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We'd heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there's enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We'd go to their fair, but we weren't going to drink their water.

Then a lady flounced up and perched on the seat opposite. She had a full bird on the wing sewn to the crown of her hat, and she was painted up like a circus pony, so we took her to be from Chicago.

If you're going to read minds, start with a simple one.

Yes, I think you'll find that all the best teachers are old bats.

But put two librarians' heads together, and mountains move.

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

Conformity is the enemy of friendship

Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.

They'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they? ... Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.

I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.

She had eyes in the back of her heart.

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.

This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody;
I read because the words that build the story become mine, to build my life;
I read not for happy endings but for new beginnings; I'm just beginning myself, and I wouldn't mind a map;
I read because I have friends who don't, and young though they are, they're beginning to run out of material;
I read because every journey begins at the library, and it's time for me to start packing;
I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready.

That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.

Nobody but a reader becomes a writer.

The trenches are all filled in, but the boys are still dying.'
Then I could read her thoughts and I knew what this day meant. Mrs. Abernathy's son could have been my dad.

Only the nonreader fears books.

At last she said, Them Burdicks isn't worth the powder and shot to blow them up. They're like a pack of hound dogs. They'll chase livestock, suck eggs, and lick the skillet. And steal? They'd steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke.

September 11
We thought we'd outdistanced history
Told our children it was nowhere near;
Even when history struck Columbine,
It didn't happen here.
We took down the maps in the classroom,
And when they were safely furled,
We told the young what they wanted to hear,
That they were immune from a menacing world.
But history isn't a folded-up map,
Or an unread textbook tome;
Now we know history's a fireman's child
Waiting at home alone.

Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.

I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.

And don't look for anything out of the law around here," she said. "The Cowgills and the Leapers is kin to the sheriff. No justice in these parts. It's every man for hisself."
"But as the saying goes, if you can't get justice," Mrs. Dowdel remarked, "get even.

We write by the light of every story we have ever read.

Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.