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Jerry Spinelli Quotes

American author, Birth: 1-2-1941 Jerry Spinelli Quotes
1.
Her smile put the sunflower to shame.
Jerry Spinelli

Her grin outshone the sunflower.
2.
She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl. We did not know what to make of her. In our minds we tried to pin her to a cork board like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.
Jerry Spinelli

3.
She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow.
Jerry Spinelli

She was transient. She was present. She was future.
4.
I’m erased. I’m gone. I’m nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl…. And… I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.
Jerry Spinelli

5.
if you learn to hate one or two persons... you'll soon hate millions of people.
Jerry Spinelli

Similar Authors: Rush Limbaugh Cassandra Clare Charles Spurgeon Deepak Chopra Stephen King George Bernard Shaw Winston Churchill Neil Gaiman Richelle Mead Jodi Picoult Francois de La Rochefoucauld Marianne Williamson Wayne Dyer Michel de Montaigne Victor Hugo
6.
Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow.
Jerry Spinelli

7.
Everybody has an angel hiding inside. When you die, your angel comes out. You can die, but not your angel. Your angel never dies.
Jerry Spinelli

8.
When you own nothing, it's easy to let things go.
Jerry Spinelli

Quote Topics by Jerry Spinelli: Eye Heart Writing Stargirl People Stars Names Feelings Years Thinking Night Mind Kids Mean Children Fall Angel Life Said Past Today Morning Hate Lasts Trying Memories Care Long Tomorrow Gone
9.
Life is populated with scarecrows—all those people and things that seem so scary and trouble our sleep. Isn't it nice to know that most of them turn out to be made of nothing but straw?
Jerry Spinelli

10.
Don't confine yourself to a select group of friends, often known as a clique. Cliques by definition leave people out. Lock yourself into one, and you'll never know how many terrific friendships you may be missing.
Jerry Spinelli

11.
Peace and harmony do not require perfection. Thank goodness for that—because life so often seems to be an itch here, a glitch there, a mess waiting to happen. Harmony is flexible. It bends with imperfection. So should you.
Jerry Spinelli

12.
The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil's fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.
Jerry Spinelli

13.
Who are you?' I didn't understand the question. I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?' I gave him my name. 'Stopthief.
Jerry Spinelli

14.
He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.' I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?' 'Inside.' It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips.
Jerry Spinelli

15.
How much better might human communication be if words were as precious as diamonds? If each of us were allotted only 100 words per day?
Jerry Spinelli

16.
We long to be found, hoping our searchers have not given up and gone home.
Jerry Spinelli

17.
Why do we wrap things? Usually to protect them. The more fragile they are, the more important the wrapping. Your dream is prey to many perils. It may shatter under the blows of criticism, evaporate with competition's heat, sink to the bottomless depths of others' indifference. Tend to your dream. Protect it as you would a fallen nestling. Until the day when it—and you—will fly.
Jerry Spinelli

18.
Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement.
Jerry Spinelli

19.
Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don’t rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you’re doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry? You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you , but now you’ll never know.
Jerry Spinelli

20.
A strong relationship is an honest relationship, and no honest relationship is all peaches and cream. Love is the key. Where love abides, anger is but a passing visitor.
Jerry Spinelli

21.
When was the last time you used the words 'teach me'? Maybe not since you started first grade? Here's an irony about school: The daily grind of tests, homework, and pressures sometimes blunts rather than stimulates a thirst for knowledge.
Jerry Spinelli

22.
I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag -- it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off.
Jerry Spinelli

23.
Because life doesn't always happen according to a timetable or calendar. And feelings can't be scheduled.
Jerry Spinelli

24.
Do not follow me! 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 tommorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!
Jerry Spinelli

25.
She's alone, they kept telling themselves, and surely she danced in no one's arms, yet somehow that seemed to matter less and less. As the night went on, and clarinet and coyote call mingled beyond the lantern light, the magic of their own powder-blue jackets and orchids seemed to fade, and it came to them in small sensations that they were more alone than she was.
Jerry Spinelli

26.
Beware of solipsism Funny word. Sounds like it means "love of melons" or something. I looked it up. It means believing that "the self is the only reality." Am I solipsist?
Jerry Spinelli

27.
Many girls have been romanced under the moon, and I don’t mean to say moonlight is overrated, but few I think have known the magic of a sunrise kiss.
Jerry Spinelli

28.
In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew
Jerry Spinelli

29.
Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.
Jerry Spinelli

30.
She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.
Jerry Spinelli

31.
We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past "weird" and "strange" and "goofy." Her ways knocked us off balance.
Jerry Spinelli

32.
When a stargirl cries, she sheds not tears but light.
Jerry Spinelli

33.
You haven't lived until you've basked in the adoration of people.
Jerry Spinelli

34.
Home is everything you can walk to.
Jerry Spinelli

35.
Did I ever tell you my pet peeve?' No,' I said. People who dress up their pets to look like Little Lord Fauntleroys or cowboys, clowns, ballerinas. As if it's not enough just to be a dog or cat or turtle.
Jerry Spinelli

36.
The earth is speaking to us, but we can't hear because of all the racket our senses are making. Sometimes we need to erase them, erase our senses. Then - maybe - the earth will touch us. The universe will speak. The stars will whisper.
Jerry Spinelli

37.
Peer pressure is just that: pressure.
Jerry Spinelli

38.
Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing.
Jerry Spinelli

39.
One of the best things about life is friends. We all agree on that. And yet our shyness with strangers often prevents friendship from ever gaining a foothold. If only we would realize that the other person is probably just as shy as we are and is simply waiting—and hoping—for us to make the first move.
Jerry Spinelli

40.
She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life
Jerry Spinelli

41.
I’m not my name. My name is something I wear, like a shirt. It gets worn. I outgrow it, I change it.
Jerry Spinelli

42.
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

43.
Why fit in when you're born to stand out?
Jerry Spinelli

44.
I had never realized how much I needed the attention of others to confirm my own presence.
Jerry Spinelli

45.
It's a shame publishers send rejection slips. Writers should get something more substantial than a slip that amounts to a pile of confetti. Publishers should send something heavier. Editors should send out rejection bricks, so at the end of a lot of years, you would have something to show besides a wheelbarrow of rejection slips. Instead you could have enough bricks to build a house.
Jerry Spinelli

46.
I feel like I'm playing chess underwater. The pieces keep floating away. I don't know where things are. I can't figure out tomorrow.
Jerry Spinelli

47.
You’ll know her more by your questions than by her answers. Keep looking at her long enough. One day you might see someone you know.
Jerry Spinelli

48.
A mockingbird has moved into our neighborhood. It perches atop a telephone pole behind our backyard. Every morning it is the first thing I hear. It is impossible to be unhappy when listening to a mockingbird. So stuffed with songs it is, it can't seem to make up it's mind which to sing first, so it sings them all, a dozen different songs at once, in a dozen different voices. On and on it sings without a pause, so peppy, even frantic, as if its voice alone is keeping the world awake.
Jerry Spinelli

49.
I'm Sorry are two of the most powerful words in our language, especially when they are not flipped blithely over the shoulder but spoken from the heart. They help restore order, balance, harmony. They reduce pain. They heal broken friendship. If they were medecine, they'd be called a miracle.
Jerry Spinelli

50.
No one's hurt is too small, no worry too removed, no blessing so elusive that it cannot be seen by the eyes in the back of the human heart.
Jerry Spinelli