Kate DiCamillo Quotes

In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.

I don't know who will overcome losses, some losses aren't meant to be overcome, but all losses make for good stories and good character development and all the jazz that makes a show compelling and watchable.

The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story

At heart, of course, a story itself is consolation's instrument.

When the going gets tough, the tough make cookies.

I come from a pretty tough background and I learned a long time ago not to be bothered.

I know there are five stages of grief, but my parents raised me to pull up my socks when times get tough.

My mum and dad split up when I was five years old, and that was quite upsetting. But ever since then, I've been very hard.

Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

The only way you're going to grow is to be in difficult situations.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

He's going to learn the hard way. Hopefully he changes his mentality quick.

It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how your life’s story will develop.

When the news you don't want to hear is looming before you like Everest, two things can happen. Tragedy can run you through like a sword, or it can become your backbone. Either you fall apart and sob, or you say, 'Right. What's next?

Life has a way of breaking even the strongest among us.

A man is not little when he finds it difficult to cope with circumstances, but when circumstances overmaster him.

He made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength. The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up...knees from buckling...hands from letting go of the blanket.

It's amazing when tragedy strikes, how strong you find that you are, and I'd seen other people go through horrible things. And I just thought, "Wow, I would be a complete mess," and then suddenly when it happens, you realize you had more strength than you knew and it helps you to get through.

Every time there are losses, there are choices to be made. You choose to live your losses as passages to anger, blame, hatred, depression and resentment, or you choose to let these losses be passages to something new, something wider, and deeper.

When the going gets tough, the tough eat ribs.

We can only feel sorry for ourselves when our misfortunes are still supportable. Once this limit is crossed, the only way to bear the unbearable is to laugh at it.