Virginia Euwer Wolff Quotes

After clearing the land, planting the orchard, building the house and barn, and surviving the Great Depression, our father died suddenly one winter night when we were small, leaving us to learn about loss before we even knew its name.

I tell you this because books for young readers are so often written about that very moment: the moment of the fork. The moment the old man cannot return to.

If you want something to grow and be so beautiful you could have a nice day just from looking at it, you have to wait.

My mother had no idea that her daughter would turn out to be a writer, but she would not let me go through a day of my childhood without music.

It's true that I had a bucolic, truly peaceful childhood, growing up in a house next to our family's orchard. We had a lot of books and art, but no electricity until I was eight years old. Since then, I have seen a lot of inner-city life, though.

Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one's own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong.

You get older and you are a whole mess of things, new thoughts, sorry feelings, big plans, enormous doubts, goling along hoping and getting disappointed, over and over again, no wonder I don't recognize my little crayon picture. It appears to be me and it is and it is not.

No one writes as slowly as I do, I'm convinced. It's so hard for me. I learn slowly; I make decisions at a snail's pace.

Because I don't think I have a handle on how to write for grown-ups. The grown-up publishing world is so fraught with one-upsmanship, scorn and snobbery. I did write an adult novel. Thank goodness it went out of print. I think we kids' authors still start out with hope every morning. We honor our audience.

I've followed Brenda Bowen as she's moved from Henry Holt to Scholastic to Simon and Schuster to Hyperion and to HarperCollins. I have complete confidence that Brenda always knows the right questions to ask. I'm not sure another editor would be able to do that.

One of the people on my Mom's Council,
he used to be a boxer.
My Mom always says he always says Get up on the 1.
You don't want them to count to 2
'cause then it's easy to count 3
while you go on being down. Always
Get up on the 1.

I grew up in rural Oregon in a log house with bark left on inside and out. We had no electricity, a massive stone fireplace, a grand piano, and tons of books.

Rise to the occassion which is life!

As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that's just slipping out the window into thin air.

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin.

He could add something to the list of things you weren't supposed to do. Don't get hurt, don't get dirty, don't get drunk, don't get scared, don't count on it. You ended up doing all of them.

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise.

You ever laughed so hard
nobody in the world could hurt you for a minute,
no matter what they tried to do to you?