Katherine Paterson
Katherine Paterson
Katherine Womeldorf Paterson is a Chinese-born American writer best known for children's novels. For four different books published 1975-1980, she won two Newbery Medals and two National Book Awards. She is one of three people to win the two major international awards; for "lasting contribution to children's literature" she won the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing in 1998 and for her career contribution to "children's and young adult literature in the broadest sense" she won the Astrid Lindgren...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth31 October 1932
CityHuai'an, China
CountryUnited States of America
The problem with people who are afraid of imagination, of fantasy, is that their world becomes so narrow that I don't see how they can imagine beyond what their senses can verify. We know from science that there are entire worlds that our senses can't verify.
I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.
What we need to wake people up to now is the crisis in imagination and concern for the greater good. We have no idea what the next ten years, much less the next fifty years, will demand of the coming generation. What we do know is that unless we have a people prepared and eager to meet those crises creatively and compassionately, there is not much hope for this poor old planet of ours.
Many people are angry when they make a mistake, but very few people have the sense to be sorry.
Sometimes you need to give people something that's for them, not just something that makes you feel good giving it.
The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.
the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.
...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.
Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied.
When my husband died, people kept telling me not to cry. People kept trying to help me to forget. But I didn't want to forget... So I realize, that if it's hard for me, how much harder it must be for you.
As much pleasure as young people get from Twittering and texting, there is no way these activities will nourish their minds and spirits the way literature can.
It is always sad to write about prejudice, but sometimes when we see it being played out in the lives of fictional characters, we can recognize it in our own lives.
The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.
It was a wonderful way to be awakened.