Jerry Spinelli Quotes

Everyone deserves to be the hero of a novel.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of their own imagination.

Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you." I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.

Respect is one of the greatest expressions of love. If other people try to write your story, it means they don't respect you. They consider that you're not a good artist who can write your own story, even though you were born to write your own story.

All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing.

As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has-or ever will have-something inside that is unique to all time.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

Each one of us is not a divine afterthought.

Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.

Every man is a hero of his own story.

You're more than a story.

Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end, of the telescope,--the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.

If you can discover what you like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique.

Human beings are complicated and flawed and unique, but we all have a story to tell. Gone are the days where our lead characters can only look like somebody else. Heroes look like all of us. We see ourselves in each others' stories. We see who we are. We see who we want to be. Sometimes we see who we don't want to be. And through that we have a greater understanding of ourselves and acceptance of each other.

No human on God's earth is a nobody.

Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

Interest in the lives of others, the high evaluation of these lives, what are they but the overflow of the interest a man finds in himself, the value he attributes to his own being?.

People have value and are important. Big or small they are important.

I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you.

I just want to make sure I could tell my story the way I want to tell it. I just want to own my truth.

You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.

As subjects, we all live in suspense, from day to day, from hour to hour; in other words, we are the hero of our own story. We cannot believe that it is finished, that we are 'finished,' even though we may say so; we expect another chapter, another installment, tomorrow or next week.

Meet the most important living person! That person is you.

Recognize that whether you are worthy or not is all a made-up 'story'...Nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give it...There's no one who comes around and stamps you 'worthy' or 'unworthy'. You do that. You make it up. You decide it...If you say you're worthy, you are. If you say you're not worthy, you're not. Either way you will live into your story.