Patricia Reilly Giff Quotes

If only she could have held on to that day, held on to that moment forever, grasped it in her fists so it wouldn't escape. If only.

The girl's mouth was chapped, tight and pinched, her skin dry. Mama would say she looked woebegone, but as Bird looked at her eyes, the word she thought of was desperate.

And the boy was right in back of her, his neck thin as a pencil. "My name is Thomas," he said. "Thomas Neary." She didn't answer. "The horse's name is Alfred, in case you want to know." He screwed up his face. "Or maybe Fernando."

But that was a realworld, and he didn't have to put it down on paper. He ripped the page out of the book, tore it into shreds, and threw them behind the tree, where they settled into the weeds.

Bird. A good name for her. She wasn't a sparrow or a songbird, though. She stood so straight, and her face was strong.

She gives him candy. They're probably going to get married.

He remembered everything. Maybe that was why he was such a great writer. What he remembered he'd put on paper, but it came out different, more interesting, more exciting than she'd ever been able to imagine.

How different everyone looked. How louldly they talked about who was starting work tomorrow, who would start in a week, while Sister Raymond sat at her desk looking serene. Bird felt a lurch in her chest. Of all of them, she though, she might be the one who'd miss school the most.

She didn't want to touch the baby. Didn't want to know if she was dead. But still she reached down, her arms underneath that small body, and pulled it up against her. The body was burning with fever. But alive. Alive!

What was the use of writing if someone didn't read what you have to say?

Thomas watched him for a few minutes. Pop was good-looking, muscular, and his hair was almost gold even though it was getting a little thin on top. Thomas must have taken after his mother, whoever she was.

He was laughing again. What was it about Bird that made him do that?

With just the sweep of a pen, Thomas, you can change the world, all of it.

He knew what she'd be reading first as she started from the beginning, reading what he'd had to say when he was younger, and then growing older, stories at first about tiny mice who lived in families in back of the wall, and stories about school, and apartments in Greenpoint and Carnasie and Flatbush, elves in Ireland that he'd pictured as Pop had told him about them, and the woman with lace on her sleeves. She kept turning pages, and then halfway through, she whispered, "Water Street." Thomas knew she was reading now about a boy who listened at a register, thinking about a family, and a lighthouse, and then she turned the next page and took a breath. It was the story he really wanted her to see: a story about a girl who though less of herself than everyone else did, who worried about everyone, even when she didn't want to, even when it made her irritable. A girl who was afraid, and who hardly knew it yet, but was on her way to being a healer like her mother, because there'd never be anything else for her, and how lucky they were just to know her.

Everything stopped: forks half raised, a bowl being passed. It seemed that the man was bathed in red, great swaths of it across his shirt and hands. And then Thomas realized: he was covered in blood.