Quotes from Jacob Have I Loved

Katherine Paterson ·  244 pages

Rating: (27.9K votes)


“To fear is one thing. To let fear grab you by the tail and swing you around is another.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


“If you could hold your nose to avoid a stink, or close your eyes to cut out a sight, why not shut off your brain to avoid a thought?”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


“But then, oh, my blessed, he smiled. I guess from that moment I knew I was going to marry Joseph Wojtkiewicz--God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable name and all. For when he smiled, he looked like the kind of man who would sing to the oysters.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


“All my dreams of leaving, but beneath them I was afraid to go. I had clung to them, to Rass, yes, even to my grandmother, afraid that if I loosened my fingers an iota, I would find myself once more cold and clean in a forgotten basket.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


“I was quite sure I was crazy, and it was amazing that as soon as I admitted it, I became quite calm. There was nothing I could do about it. I seemed relatively harmless. After”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved



“suppose if alcohol had been available to me that November, I would have become a drunk. As it was, the only thing I could lose my miserable self in was books. We”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


“Don't tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don't need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you're after, my dear.”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


“I was not happy in any way that would make sense to most people, but I was, for the first time in my life, deeply content with what life was giving me. Part”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


“Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied”
― Katherine Paterson, quote from Jacob Have I Loved


About the author

Katherine Paterson
Born place: in Qing Jiang, China
Born date October 31, 1932
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Popular quotes

“(He) let evil into his mind and it took over his heart. We best be on our guard and keep our minds on what's right and true so we don't become things we'll regret.....That's why we all need to know Jesus in our hearts.....Ain't no one else who can keep watch over our hearts like He can. Ain't no one else who can take the bad out and replace it with good. ”
― Jennifer Erin Valent, quote from Fireflies in December


“And do you think your refusal to believe will convince God to change his nature? He is who he is no matter what you think of him. Despite what Americans believe, the universe is not a democracy. Truth is not determined by the majority. As for hell, if you were as just and holy as God is, you would understand that all men deserve hell. It is no puzzle that men should go to hell. What is a puzzle is that men should go to heaven.”
― Randy Alcorn, quote from Safely Home


“Take it easy, Grace," Noah told her as he stepped into his slacks. "According to Ben she's doing fine now and is kicking up a fuss at all the attention. To quote Ben, 'She's pitching a bitch about looking old and frail.”
― Lori Foster, quote from Too Much Temptation


“The unreal is the illogical. And this age seems to have a capacity for surpassing even the acme of illogicality, of anti-logicality: it is as if the monstrous reality of the war had blotted out the reality of the world. Fantasy has become logical reality, but reality evolves the most a-logical phantasmagoria. An age that is softer and more cowardly than any preceding age suffocates in waves of blood and poison-gas; nations of bank clerks and profiteers hurl themselves upon barbed wire; a well-organized humanitarianism avails to hinder nothing, but calls itself the Red Cross and prepares artificial limbs for the victims; towns starve and coin money out of their own hunger; spectacled school-teachers lead storm-troops; city dwellers live in caves; factory hands and other civilians crawl out on their artificial limbs once more to the making of profits. Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.

The melodramatic revulsion which characterizes this age as insane, the melodramatic enthusiasm which calls it great, are both justified by the swollen incomprehensibility and illogicality of the events that apparently make up its reality. Apparently! For insane or great are terms that can never be applied to an age, but only to an individual destiny. Our individual destinies, however, are as normal as they ever were. Our common destiny is the sum of our single lives, and each of these single lives is developing quite normally, in accordance, as it were, with its private logicality. We feel the totality to be insane, but for each single life we can easily discover logical guiding motives. Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?”
― Hermann Broch, quote from The Sleepwalkers


“The Bible is not an intellectual sinecure, and its acceptance should not be like setting up a talismanic lock that seals both the mind and the conscience against the intrusion of new thoughts. Revelation is not vicarious thinking. Its purpose is not to substitute for but to extend our understanding. The prophets tried to extend the horizon of our conscience and to impart to us a sense of the divine partnership in our dealings with good and evil and in our wrestling with life’s enigmas. They tried to teach us how to think in the categories of God: His holiness, justice and compassion. The appropriation of these categories, far from exempting us from the obligation to gain new insights in our own time, is a challenge to look for ways of translating Biblical commandments into programs required by our own conditions. The full meaning of the Biblical words was not disclosed once and for all. Every hour another aspect is unveiled. The word was given once; the effort to understand it must go on for ever. It is not enough to accept or even to carry out the commandments. To study, to examine, to explore the Torah is a form of worship, a supreme duty. For the Torah is an invitation to perceptivity, a call for continuous understanding.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, quote from God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism


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