Sharon Draper Quotes

I've been through a lot. I've thought a lot about life, and I've spent a lot of time studying history and science.

I think critics are very useful. But I think that they, in a way, betray their position when they stop people looking for themselves.

Some broad themes brought me where I am today. At a very young age, my hobby became thinking and finding connections.

It's not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers' own creative thinking, then that's got to be to everybody's benefit.

There's nothing particularly unique about my experiences except that they're my experiences.

'Knowing' is one of those movies where you're going to get the spectacle, and you're going to have the entertainment in the grand science fiction tradition. But also, it will perhaps stimulate some discussion to help you sort out on your own where you might choose to go in terms of your own needs. Now, I say that without preaching.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

I want my readers to find their own way.

True education is limited to those people who would die without knowing, whereas the masses in the institutions are merely going through the motions, for education is a way of living.

People can't just listen to the music and have their own imagination and take them where they wanna go.

I don't think or write from big ideals.

When I write the songs, I don't dictate how people should interpret them.

Experience is stronger than belief. Once we have experiences our mind begins to open. This works better than me forcing my own experience or knowledge onto anyone. Show them how to have their own experiences.

Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other people's opinions.

...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.

The point is not to convert anyone to our view, but rather to help people wake to their own view, their own sanity.

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.

I like for people to figure things out for themselves. It's not like I have the right answer, but if I have a visceral reaction to something, I'm sure that other people will, too.

A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.

I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It's amazing how we go to school when we're so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don't have to memorize anything.

I've always done music to push people to get them to get uncomfortable in their seat so they could wrestle with things. Not to become pew potatoes, just simply sitting there, growing fat with knowledge and not applying it.

Never cease doubting. When the doubts stop it is because you have stopped journeying.