Mo Willems Quotes

People think, Hey, I love kids, I want to write children's books. But they think children are happy. That's their first mistake. [Messinger, Jonathan. "Guilt for dinner: The Mo Willems interview." Hipsqueak. 5 May 2011. Web. 18 November 2011.] ~ Mo Willems

A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy.
An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle. ~ Mo Willems

All of the life-changing awesome
words and pictures and ideas
inside your library are useless
without just one word outside
your library: Open. ~ Mo Willems

The difference between children and adults is that they're shorter - not dumber. ~ Mo Willems

And the moral is: If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave. - Mo Willems, Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs ~ Elisabeth Egan

First of all, I'm not even tired. ~ Mo Willems

I'm a floating TURNIP HEAD ~ Mo Willems

It's the middle of the day in China! ~ Mo Willems

A book, being a physical object, engenders a certain respect that zipping electrons cannot. Because you cannot turn a book off, because you have to hold it in your hands, because a book sits there, waiting for you, whether you think you want it or not, because of all these things, a book is a friend. It's not just the content, but the physical being of a book that is there for you always and unconditionally. ~ Mo Willems

There are always exceptions,' replied Flea. 'They are what make you exceptional. ~ Mo Willems

She went boneless. ~ Mo Willems

We create our work for children not because they're "cute," but because they're human beings, deserving of respect. ~ Mo Willems

Writing for children is as easy as describing the history of the Byzantium in three words. ~ Mo Willems

I bet your mom would let me.
-Pigeon, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus- ~ Mo Willems

I Want A Puppy! Right Here! Right Now! ~ Mo Willems

The first bowl of chocolate pudding was too hot, but Goldilocks ate it all anyway because, hey, it's chocolate pudding, right? ~ Mo Willems

An artist is waiting for the audience to understand the work. A craftsman is working to understand the audience. ~ Mo Willems

Conditions may vary. We will strive to make your stay as comfortable as possible. However there will be turbulence. There will be unexpected events. There will be human error. Fortunately, we are happy to provide you love. At no extra cost. ~ Mo Willems

Possibly because I've lived so much of my life in difficult circumstances, I think I have a more profound understanding of life. ~ Mo Yan

Thank you, Mr. Secretary General, UNICEF Executive Director, Excellencies and distinguished guests from across the world.

My name is Kim Nam Jun, also known as RM, the leader of the group BTS. It's an incredible honour to be invited to an occasion with such significance for today's young generation.

Last November, BTS launched the "Love Myself" campaign with UNICEF, building on our belief that "true love first begins with loving myself." We have been partnering with UNICEF's #ENDviolence program to protect children and young people all over the world from violence.

Our fans have become a major part of this campaign with their action and enthusiasm. We truly have the best fans in the world!

I would like to begin by talking about myself.

I was born in Ilsan, a city near Seoul, South Korea. It's a beautiful place, with a lake, hills, and even an annual flower festival. I spent a happy childhood there, and I was just an ordinary boy.

I would look up at the night sky in wonder and dream the dreams of a boy. I used to imagine that I was a superhero, saving the world.

In an intro to one of our early albums, there is a line that says, "My heart stopped…I was maybe nine or ten."

Looking back, that's when I began to worry about what other people thought of me and started seeing myself through their eyes. I stopped looking up at the stars at night. I stopped daydreaming. I tried to jam myself into mo ~ Kim Namjoon

We're already too late, so there's no need to go any faster. ~ Mo Yan

I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous? What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness, and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. Anatomically, many of them don't even seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Mo-Ron. (I may be imagining some of these.) As I read the magazine, I kept hearing a voice in my head, like the voice from a 1950s B-movie trailer, saying: They came from Planet Imbecile! ~ Bill Bryson

Women in Africa are really the pillar of the society, are the most productive segment of society, actually. They do agriculture. ~ Mo Ibrahim

There's an inverse relationship between my temper and my ability to control my accent. If you hear me say 'Fiddledeedee', run for the hills, because I'm getting ready to take out bystanders. ~ Molly Harper

One Christmas my father kept our tree up till March. He hated to see it go. I loved that. ~ Mo Rocca

You're mine, mo duinne ... Mine alone, now and forever ... Aye, I mean to use ye hard, my Sassenach ... I want to own you, to posses you, body and soul. pge 319 ~ Diana Gabaldon

Many Africans are used to a life where they get up in the morning and don't know what they're going to do that day. ~ Mo Ibrahim

I think a fair amount about the fact that we're all going to die. It occurs to me at incredibly inopportune moments - I'll be standing in a bar, having managed to get an attractive guy to laugh, and I'll be laughing, too, and maybe dancing a little bit, and then everything goes slo-mo for a second and I'll think: Are these people aware that we're all going to the same place in the end? ~ Lena Dunham

When I go to China, people call me 'Uncle Mo' because they refer me as Yao Ming's uncle. I'm pleased to be his uncle as long as he listens to me! ~ Dikembe Mutombo

I went to the four levers. None of them were marked. There was only one way to figure out which one was the right one. I had to call upon all my Traveler experience and special powers to figure it out. It's called ... Eenie, meenie, miney ... mo!
-Bobby Pendragon ~ D.J. MacHale

There is nothing more to lose; there is nothing more to fear. Eckhart Tolle says this is "to die before you die," to live life knowing that because one day it'll all be gone, there's really nothing that you have, and so nothing you have to lose. Like ~ Mo Gawdat

One puts on black robes to scare the hell out of white people, while the other puts on white robes to scare the hell out of blacks. ~ Mo Udall

If we cannot accurately measure poverty, we surely cannot accurately measure our efforts to tackle it. ~ Mo Ibrahim

While the Marshall Plan was important for Europe's recovery, Europe's prosperity was really built on economic integration and policy coherence. ~ Mo Ibrahim

I stand for the Midwest. That's why the album's titled 'M.O.,' 'cause I'm still holding it down like that. My friends and family all call me Mo, so it's kind of like really representing where I'm from and me at the same time. ~ Nelly

When literature exists, perhaps we do not notice how important it is, but when it does not exist, our lives become coarsened and brutal. For this reason, I am proud of my profession, but also aware of its importance. ~ Mo Yan

I ended up being a businessman unwittingly. I wanted to be an academic; I wanted to be like Einstein. ~ Mo Ibrahim

It is very difficult for any dictator or any incumbent to falsify the results of an election and just get away with it. ~ Mo Ibrahim

Likability is a soft skill that leads to hard results. ~ Mo Bunnell

He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem's torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning toward something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem's smiles, he knows Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant was happy. Willem's face and neck dominate the canvas, and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table; he knows it from the way JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem's face. He has the sense that if he says Willem's name, the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem's hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn't do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. "The title's card's been mounted already," JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title - Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street - and he feels his breath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Beli, who'd been waiting for something exactly like her body her whole life, was sent over the moon by what she now knew. By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring. Like stumbling into the wizard Shazam's cave or finding the crashed ship of the Green Lantern! Hypatia Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self. Started pinching her shoulders back, wearing the tightest clothes she had. Dios mío, La Inca said every time the girl headed out. Why would God give you that burden in this country of all places! ~ Junot Diaz

If you are a fan, you have two choices. Go to the stadium, where you see the whole beauty of it. Or stay at home, watch the beautiful moves on the slo-mo cameras. Don't go to the cinema, because you won't see it there. ~ Carlos Cuaron

Transfer pricing is causing huge problems in Africa. ~ Mo Ibrahim

To be frank, I don't think President Obama gives much thought to Africa - or gives much to Africa. ~ Mo Ibrahim

Ultimately the judge threw Moore's suit out of court, saying he had no case. Ironically, in his decision, the judge cited the HeLa cell line as a precedent for what happened with the Mo cell line. The fact that no one had sued over the growth or ownership of the HeLa cell line, he said, illustrated that patients didn't mind when doctors took their cells and turned them into commercial products. The judge believed Moore was unusual in his objections. But in fact, he was simply the first to realize there was something potentially objectionable going on. ~ Rebecca Skloot

I always kind of aim with the action stuff to make it feel like, as an audience member, you're experiencing what the people are experiencing. As soon as you go into slow-mo or repeated edits, shooting it like it's a stunt, it takes it out of that reality. The more real you make that stuff, the more tense it will be. ~ Joel Edgerton

Mama Mo does not insist. She simply makes things a reality by assuming they are such: ~ Gillian Flynn

I will always come for you, a ghra. You are my life, the very air I breathe, and I cannot be without you. Taim I ngra leat. Is tu mo shonuachar. I love you. You're my soul mate. ~ Lisa Sanchez

Sometimes, when I went to the spring to wash early in the morning," he murmured, "there'd be tiny fairies flitting around above the water, not much bigger than the butterflies you have here, and blue as violet petals. They liked to fly into my hair. Sometimes they spat in my face. They weren't very friendly, but they shone like glowworms by night. I sometimes caught one and put it in a jar. If I let it out at night before going to sleep I had wonderful dreams."
"Capricorn said there were trolls and giants, too," said Meggie quietly.
Dustfinger gave her a thoughtful look. "Yes, there were," he said. "But Capricorn wasn't particularly fond of them. He'd have liked to do away with them all. He had them hunted. He hunted anything that could run."
"It must be a dangerous world." Meggie was trying to imagine it all: the giants, the trolls, and the fairies. Mo had once given her a book about fairies.
Dustfinger shrugged. "Yes, it's dangerous, so what? This world's dangerous, too, isn't it? ~ Cornelia Funke

We need to keep pressure on our own governments to force more and more transparency. ~ Mo Ibrahim

And I've got admirers. Okay, probably drunken geeks with nothing better to do than scroll through a thousand videos to check out cleavage shots in slow-mo, but still. ~ Jeanne Ryan

I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mo ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

We don't need an alarm system. We barely have anythings worth stealing."
"Do you want me moving in?"
"NO!"
"then you're getting an alarm. ~ Erica O'Rourke

The U.S. has been a great friend all these years, but as soon as Africa found itself starting to move up, the U.S. is really disengaging. ~ Mo Ibrahim

Modern slavery is a hidden crime and notoriously difficult to measure. ~ Mo Ibrahim