If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
Katherine PatersonRead
The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Being a writer allows you to connect deeply with readers who resonate with your emotions.
This quote highlights the profound connection that writers can forge with their audience, as their written words can evoke understanding and empathy. Through storytelling, writers express their innermost thoughts and fears, and in turn, readers can relate to and appreciate these vulnerabilities, creating a shared experience that transcends individual insecurities.
Themes
WriterReadersFeelingsUnderstandingConnection
In practice
Example use cases
In a writing workshop, I shared a quote by Katherine Paterson to illustrate the emotional bond between writers and readers.
More from Katherine Paterson
All quotes βIt's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
Katherine PatersonRead
She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.
Katherine PatersonRead
Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.
Katherine PatersonRead
We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story. And somehow, miraculously, a story that comes from deep in my heart calls from a reader that which is deepest in his or her heart, and together from our secret hidden selves we create a story that neither of us could have told alone.
Katherine PatersonRead
The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.
Katherine PatersonRead
Similar quotes
What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.
Jane YolenRead
Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
Eleanor CattonRead
Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.
Franz LisztRead
I don't care whether the story is real or fantastical. I tell the story that needs to be told.
Jane YolenRead
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway - revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for 'The Lion King' a year in advance, and essentially a family comes as if to a picnic, and they pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is - a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar. We live in a recycled culture.
Stephen SondheimRead
Write because you love the art and the discipline, not because you're looking to sell something.
Ann PatchettRead