Jerry Spinelli Quotes

My idea of heaven is not writing.

When my husband and I had to escape from Czarist Russia with a price on our head [in 1905], we had utopian dreams of what Russia might become under a communist government with the Czar deposed but never really thought we would live to see it. But I did live to see my utopian dream come to reality. But it was not Russia. It is America, here and now. There is not a single thing that we revolutionists hoped for, that has not come to pass in America—the greatest country in human history.

A man dies and goes to heaven. He is being shown around by an angel. Everything is just so sweet and gentle, the total golden tender presence of God everywhere, a pond over there, a beautiful field there, and some hills for people who like to hike, and this expansiveness in every direction of sky and light and physical beauty. And there is this section separated from the rest; it has beautiful high walls. The man who's just come to heaven says, "What's over there?" The angel says, "That's for the fundamentalists. They don't consider it heaven if anyone else got in.

There's heaven. There it is. What more do we mean? People, free to come together, and in beauty - for growth.

America was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe just about anything could happen in America.

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

I'd walked too close to heaven and gotten a glimpse. The hell I'd lived before her no longer appealed to me.

I wonder if heaven got a ghetto?

Creative experience foreshadows a new Heaven and a new Earth.

The other day I dreamed that I was at the gates of heaven. And St. Peter said, 'Go back to Earth, there are no slums up here.'

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

...heaven for climate, and hell for society.

Liberty and freedom were the primary reason that people wanted to come here. They wanted to escape bondage, slavery, tyranny, poverty, whatever, where they lived. It was America that promised a much better life.

Someday in heaven, when the angels all sing, well, these rags that I'm wearing will be fit for a king.

And in that Heaven of all their wish, there shall be no more land, say fish

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.

My belief in the growth and permanence of democracy is undimmed. I know that the people will cast off the new dictatorship as they did the old. I believe as firmly as in my youth that humanity will surmount the era of poverty and war. Life will be happier and more beautiful for all. I believe in the GOLDEN AGE.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.

To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born "illegals."

Here or nowhere is our heaven.

Heaven is neither a place nor a time.

And then what?" said her daemon sleepily. "Build what?" "The Republic of Heaven," said Lyra.