1.
The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.
Richard Peck
2.
I read because one life isn't enough and in the pages of a book, I can be anybody.
Richard Peck
3.
Only the nonreader fears books.
Richard Peck
4.
We write by the light of every story we have ever read.
Richard Peck
5.
Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.
Richard Peck
6.
We don't write what we know. We write what we wonder about.
Richard Peck
7.
If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.
Richard Peck
8.
Read to your children Twenty minutes a day; You have the time, And so do they. Read while the laundry is in the machine; Read while the dinner cooks; Tuck a child in the crook of your arm And reach for the library books. Hide the remote, Let the computer games cool, For one day your children will be off to school; Remedial? Gifted? You have the choice; Let them hear their first tales In the sound of your voice. Read in the morning; Read over noon; Read by the light of Goodnight Moon. Turn the pages together, Sitting close as you'll fit, Till a small voice beside you says, "Hey, don't quit.
Richard Peck
9.
Because nobody but a reader ever became a writer.
Richard Peck
10.
When I read a good book, it's like traveling the world without ever leaving my chair.
Richard Peck
11.
This is how you hold onto your family. You hold them with open hands so they are free to find futures of their own. It's just that simple.
Richard Peck
12.
Never trust an ugly woman. She's got a grudge against the world,' said Grandma who was no oil painting herself.
Richard Peck
13.
...they'd just tell you to turn the other cheek, wouldn't they?...Trouble is, Mrs. Dowdel observed, after you've turned the other cheek four times, you run out of cheeks.
Richard Peck
14.
Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.
Richard Peck
15.
[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.
Richard Peck
16.
Fame is a funny thing, like a secret, both are hard to keep.
Richard Peck
17.
September 11 We thought we'd outdistanced history Told our children it was nowhere near; Even when history struck Columbine, It didn't happen here. We took down the maps in the classroom, And when they were safely furled, We told the young what they wanted to hear, That they were immune from a menacing world. But history isn't a folded-up map, Or an unread textbook tome; Now we know history's a fireman's child Waiting at home alone.
Richard Peck
18.
I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.
Richard Peck
19.
If you're going to read minds, start with a simple one.
Richard Peck
20.
But put two librarians' heads together, and mountains move.
Richard Peck
21.
Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.
Richard Peck
22.
I read.. because one life is not enough
Richard Peck
23.
I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing.
Richard Peck
24.
That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.
Richard Peck
25.
Martin Wilson's What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood.
Richard Peck
26.
Grandma, how old is she?" "Oh I don't know." Grandma said. "You'd have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.
Richard Peck
27.
I read because one of these days I'm going to get out of this town, and I'm going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready
Richard Peck
28.
With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world.
Richard Peck
29.
The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.
Richard Peck