Recess Spinelli Quotes

Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Hearing the faraway sounds of children at recess makes me understand that I am no longer life's main character. ~ Alec Sulkin

She turned left when everyone else turned right. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published. I wrote four novels that nobody wanted, sent them out all over, collected hundreds and hundreds of rejection slips. ~ Jerry Spinelli

In my mind, I'm writing for everybody. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Have you ever stopped to appreciate the simple ability to open your front door and step outside? And ~ Jerry Spinelli

A true story. One afternoon when our son, Richard, was in fifth grade, my wife called me at work to say he had received a one-day suspension for losing his temper during recess. Because we both worked, this was more of a punishment for us than it was for Richard. He hated going to school anyway. I called the school immediately and attempted to reason with the principal. She refused to understand my point of view, and by the time I finished yelling at her, she had suspended Richard for two more days. ~ Tim Shortridge

Beneath every goober is a kid. A person. Maybe he's not what you would call 'regular.' But so what? Is that a bad thing? ~ Jerry Spinelli

I mean if she's real, she's in big trouble. How long do you think somebody who's really like that is going to last around here? ~ Jerry Spinelli

In the book i'm reading (The Principal) the main chareter best friend has to go to a differnt school. I can picture them waiting at the bus stop together crying. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Of course, all of their words for a thousand years could not fill the hole left by his mother, but they could raise a loving fence around it so he didn't keep falling in. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Events become feelings, feelings become events ~ Jerry Spinelli

The horizontal world I had thought I occupied was tilting, dumping me somewhere else, somewhere new. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Maniac kept trying, but he still couldn't see it, this color business. He didn't figure he was white any more than the East Enders were black. He looked himself over pretty hard and came up with at least seven different shades and colors right on his own skin, not one of them being what he would call white (except for his eyeballs, which weren't any whiter than the eyeballs of the kids in the East End). ~ Jerry Spinelli

In 'Hokey Pokey,' bikes are kind of more than bikes alone. They become mustangs; they become creatures that rip up the dust as they gallop across the Great Plains. ~ Jerry Spinelli

To have a girl two thousand miles away going to pieces over you, weeping at the mere memory of you, losing her appetite, losing herself and her self respect - well, that's a trophy enough for a guy's ego, huh? ~ Jerry Spinelli

I remember once my kid got in trouble for saying to his teacher, "What time is fucking recess?" and I remember thinking, "Now where would he fucking pick up something like that? ~ Dennis Miller

The US is safest when Congress is in recess. ~ Will Rogers

What's the matter with you? Huh? Huh?'
'Why can't you be normal?'
'Why do you wanna be so different? ~ Jerry Spinelli

When the sun is a bike ride away, I will hear it. It will sound like wind in treetops. I will awaken. ~ Jerry Spinelli

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up. ~ Jerry Spinelli

How do you not try to get something you want?
How do you stop caring about the thing that you care about the most?
How do you erase the other half of your own self? ~ Jerry Spinelli

The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people, ~ Moshe Ya'alon

But sometimes, people kick you to the ground at recess because they think the shape of your eyes is funny. They lunge at you because they see a vulnerable body. Or a different skin color. Or a different name. Or a girl. They think that you won't hit back - that you'll just lower your eyes and hide. And sometimes, to protect yourself, to make it go away, you do.

But sometimes, you find yourself standing in exactly the right position, wielding exactly the right weapon to hit back. ~ Marie Lu

When bad things turn good, the reason can usually be found in the human heart - sometimes in the hearts of great masses of people, sometimes in the heart of a solitary soul. ~ Jerry Spinelli

It was the day of the worms. That first almost-warm, after-the-rainy-night day in April, when you bolt from your house to find yourself in a world of worms. They were as numerous here in the East End as they had been in the West. The sidewalks, the streets. The very places where they didn't belong. Forlorn, marooned on concrete and asphalt, no place to burrow, April's orphans. ~ Jerry Spinelli

I sat parked for a while in the parent pickup lot, watching a bunch of little kids run relays up and down the field. To be nine years old. To have life simply about family and friends and who was mad at who and which games you wanted to play at recess, and getting gold stars on spelling tests, an feeling that first crush.
Laurel, you had everything back then, and you didn't even know it. ~ Jennifer Castle

The whole love of the "Law" has been lavished on and has cherished the Sabbath. As the day of rest, it gives life its balance and rhythm; it sustains the week. Rest is something entirely different from a mere recess, from a mere interruption of work, from not working. A recess is something essentially physical, part of the earthly everyday sphere. Rest, on the other hand, is essentially religious, part of the atmosphere of the divine; it leads us to the mystery, to the depth from which all commandments come, too. It is that which re-creates and reconciles, the recreation in which the soul, as it were, creates itself again and catches the breath of life-- that in life which is sabbatical. ~ Leo Baeck

How wearisom
Eternity so spent in worship paid
To whom we hate. Let us not then pursue
By force impossible, by leave obtain'd
Unacceptable, though in Heav'n, our state
Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek
Our own good from our selves, and from our own
Live to our selves, though in this vast recess,
Free, and to none accountable, preferring
Hard liberty before the easie yoke
Of servile Pomp ~ John Milton

As we meandered, she said my name three times:
"Stargirl?"
"Yes?"
"That was better than TV."
"It was."
"Stargirl?"
"Yes?"
"Does the sun do that everyday?"
"Yes."
"Stargirl?"
"Yes?"
"Everyday is sun day. ~ Jerry Spinelli

Your journey to capture her soul is one of patience and persistence as it lives in the hidden recess of her heart it is buried in her conscience and holds the key to her most private thoughts and hidden desires the journey is one of understanding and love, not any one can travel there as it is guarded by the heartbreaks of her past and hidden the sea of sorrow and regret.
- Richard M Knittle Jr. ~ Richard M. Knittle Jr.

If we are destined to be together again, be happy to know you'll be getting the real me, not some blubbering half me. ~ Jerry Spinelli

No When. No Then. Only Now. ~ Jerry Spinelli

The Clock on the Morning Lenape Building

Must Clocks be circles?
Time is not a circle.
Suppose the Mother of All Minutes started
right here, on the sidewalk
in front of the Morning Lenape Building, and the parade
of minutes that followed--each of them, say, one inch long--
headed out that way, down Bridge Street.
Where would Now be? This minute?
Out past the moon?
Jupiter?
The nearest star?

Who came up with minutes, anyway?
Who needs them?
Name one good thing a minute's ever done.
They shorten fun and measure misery.
Get rid of them, I say.
Down with minutes!
And while you're at it--take hours
with you too. Don't get me started
on them.

Clocks--that's the problem.
Every clock is a nest of minutes and hours.
Clocks strap us into their shape.
Instead of heading for the nearest star, all we do
is corkscrew.
Clocks lock us into minutes, make Ferris wheel
riders of us all, lug us round and round
from number to number,
dice the time of our lives into tiny bits
until the bits are all we know
and the only question we care to ask is
"What time is it?"

As if minutes could tell.
As if Arnold could look up at this clock on
the Lenape Building and read:
15 Minutes till Found.
As if Charlie's time is not forever stuck
on Half Past Grace.
As if a swarm of stinging minutes wa ~ Jerry Spinelli

Since true listening involves a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the others. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable, and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the dance of love is begun again. ~ M. Scott Peck

The flash would prove that proton decay really happens. The flash would mean that the matter of the proton - the solid stuff - had turned into the energy of the flash (E-mc2). Totally. Nothing left behind. No ash. No smoke. No smell. Nada. One moment it's there, the next moment - pffft - gone.
What would it mean? Only this: Nothing lasts. Nothing. Because everything that exists is made of protons. ~ Jerry Spinelli

During the year, our schools are busy slashing P.E. and recess to make more time for math. During the summer, we get ourselves worked into a tizzy that our children will forget their fractions. ~ Darell Hammond

But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Actually, between books is precisely when I do give myself vacations. ~ Jerry Spinelli

This dual position suggests a basic tension or 'existential dilemma' in human living that each of us seeks to resolve: the search for, and attempt to construct, a way of being that somehow will balance our unique reflections upon our lived experience with the perceived demands and desires of being-with-others. In this sense, the fundamental project of living, for all of us, becomes the struggle to achieve relational balance between or experience of our own self-construct, our experience of others as we have construed them to be, and our experience of that 'between-ness' that emerges through our every encounter with the world. ~ Ernesto Spinelli

My happy wagon is almost empty, Leo. Only five pebbles left. Happywise, I'm operating on only 25 percent capacity. Remember when I first showed my wagon to you? How many pebbles were in it then? Seventeen? And then I put another in, remember? I never told you this, but before I went to bed that night, after we kissed for the first time on the sidewalk outside my house, I put in the last two pebbles. Twenty. Total happiness. For the first time ever. It stayed that way until I painted that big sign on a sheet and hung it outside the school for all the world to see ... ~ Jerry Spinelli

No matter what day it is, no matter what time, no matter where I am - I'm always at the star party, staring at the slhouette on the crest of the hill, whishing that one dark shape would split in two. But it never does. ~ Jerry Spinelli

To Zinkoff there is not one darkness, but many. There is the dark in the closet and the dark under the bed and the dark he can never see: the dark inside a drawer. No matter how fast he opens a drawer, trying to catch the dark, the light pours in faster. There is the dark of outside and the dark of inside. Unlike most children, Zinkoff is not afraid of the dark. Outside darkness does not frighten him. His father has told him that the stars are faraway suns, and the thought of all those suns up there gives Zinkoff a warm and cozy feeling at night. Inside, he seems to carry his own sunshine with him - he's a sunshine bottle - even into the closet, where sometimes he hides from Polly without a twinge of fear. ~ Jerry Spinelli

I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence. ~ Jerry Spinelli