Ann Rinaldi Quotations

I think everyone should read Governor William Bradford's diary.

As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.

Little things about the Pilgrims surprised me. For instance, the fact that the first duel in America was fought at Plymouth by two teenaged boys over a girl. The life the Pilgrims led in Holland before coming to America also surprised me.

The people who founded America, who fought for its freedom, did not look to anyone else to get them out of their troubles. They took matters into their own hands and answered only to God and their peers. In today's world, sacrifice and hardship are not in the everyday language, and instant gratification is foremost.

There are depths to the human soul that should not be fathomed.

Doing good doesn't always make you feel good. I don't care what they tell you in church.

You don't trade in the devil you know for the one you don't know.

Are all American girls as daft as you, Rachel?" "I hope so," I said.

When a woman's face is wrinkled And her hairs are sprinkled, With gray, Lackaday! Aside she's cast, No one respect will pay; Remember, Lasses, remember. And while the sun shines make hay: You must not expect in December, The flowers you gathered in May.

Because I had already resolved that if you're afraid of love, your heart will break anyway, only in not half so nice a fashion as it does when you let somebody love you.

Love is like light and there are two kinds, the bursting fireworks of the moment and the solid, fixed stars that sometimes become obscured in the heavens, but are always there, year after year, for a lifetime.

A person doesn't ask permission to fall in love; not even of themselves.

Sometimes it takes courage to leave.

No one is a virgin, because life has screwed us all.

Let me say the good are often punished unfairly.

Sometimes it take courage to leave.

The most important thing we ever have to learn in life is to live with our choices.

When I wrote, I felt better, as if I had remade the world all of a piece, the way I wanted it to be, not the way it was.

When I write I am the real me.

I want a place. It has to do with the kind of person I want to be. And how I fit in to everything. I want people to listen when I open my mouth. And know I'm worth listening to." She stared at me. "That's all?" To me it was not all, it was everything.

Most of our miseries we bring on ourselves. And they're the sum of our own stupidity.

A person has to be strong in life. A person must practice strength, even if they don't feel it.

I will stand by you. You must not be afraid. This is a brave land, Susanna, founded by brave people who never shrank from their duty or their vision of freedom. But this land has a future only if each of us stands up for what is right when it is given us to do so.

And in that moment I possessed and lost the whole world and everything in it and was left with the feeling and the knowledge, which is love, that no matter how we give ourselves we always end up losing. That to love is to lose, the moment we agree to the bargain. And that, being human, we keep standing there wanting to lose more....

I didn't know how to say goodbye. Words were stupid. They said so little. Yet they opened up holes you could fall into and never climb out of again.