Blue Balliett > Quotes

“The greatest art belongs to the world. Do not be intimidated by the experts. Trust your instincts. Do not be afraid to go against what you were taught, or what you were told to see or believe. Every person, every set of eyes, has the right to the truth.”
― Blue Balliett, Chasing Vermeer

“What was a foreigner, anyway? Is the place you're born the only place you really belong? At what point do you stop being from "away" and start being from "here"?”
― Blue Balliett, The Calder Game

“Passing time isn't a steady thing. People try to measure it, but some days seem to have years packed into them, and others pass in the blink of an eye. Some days matter, and others don't.”
― Blue Balliett, The Calder Game

“Every book is a box of ideas.”
― Blue Balliett, The Danger Box

“I don't know how anyone else sees the world and no one else sees the world exactly how I see the world! We each see in our own, unique way.”
― Blue Balliett, The Danger Box

“You will come to agree with me.”
― Blue Balliett, Chasing Vermeer

“Yes, the wind came up--" Mrs. Sharpe began. She paused.
"And changed us all," Petra said softly.”
― Blue Balliett, The Calder Game

“The wind came up and changed us all..”
― Blue Balliett

“The more you search the more you find.”
― Blue Balliett, The Calder Game

“not really a quote but here is is

The setting is the start.The story hangs from that hook,and the characters move slowly around one another.

Each piece has its own shape and size.

The characters think they see the wires that connect them.

But that isn't possible.

Or is it?

Who makes the rules?”
― Blue Balliett, The Calder Game

“Reading is a tool no one can take away. A million bad things may happen in life and it'll still be with you, like a flashlight that never needs a battary. Reading can offer a crack of light on the blackest of nights.”
― Blue Balliett

“I love the way a list makes a big hodgepodge of things simmer down and behave.”
― Blue Balliett, The Danger Box

“Language was a code, like numbers, he said, and depended just as much on rhythm for its power”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“Picasso said that art is a lie, but a lie that tells the truth" ... Calder wondered what Picasso had meant. Was it that art wasn't exactly the real world, but it said something real?”
― Blue Balliett, Chasing Vermeer

“Grams calls them "worry crumbs" those leftover bits of an uncomfortable idea. She fixes worry crumbs with sayings and she has one to fit almost any size mess or confusion.”
― Blue Balliett, The Danger Box

“The smallest detail may be the one that matters the most”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“You could pick out what felt surprising in a book or poem and then save it, as long as you also wrote down the name of the person who wrote it first”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“Depending on how you look at things. Your world could change completely. His thought, was that most people bend over backwards to fit everything that happened to them into something that they could understand. In other words, people some times twisted what was actually in front of them to fit what they they thought should be there, and never even realize they were doing it. People like to see what they were supposed to see and find what they were supposed to find.”
― Blue Balliett, Chasing Vermeer

“Perhaps Calder's secret lies in the idea that each mobile is, truly, a metaphor for the experience of living, for the interconnected movement of separate elements that make up a life. Each mobile tells us to stop, to wonder, to wonder some more, and to celebrate.”
― Blue Balliett

“She wouldn't be helpless, not ever, not if she could see a way out. She wouldn't allow that to happen. She could see that being helpless in a situation like this was dangerously close to becoming just plain less”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“Inside this building, the world had felt generous, limitless, like a safe spot for dreams to grow.”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“my grandpa and grandma aren't like me. They're more like sheets drying outside on a breezy day--they change directions without any fuss. But me, if I was a sheet and the wind blew me, I'd never stop flapping.”
― Blue Balliett, The Danger Box

“What was a little dark, anyway? Just no sun, [Petra] reminded herself as her sneakers pounded toward the opening. Just dark, all three fine, she whispered to herself again and again, spinning the words outward into a mobile in her mind. They floated into dark-three, all-just-fine and then into all-fine, dark-just-three.”
― Blue Balliett, The Calder Game

“in the summer, it's short greens and tall greens and sometimes a smudge of other colors. In winter, it's squinty white,and sometimes deep when it looks flat. In early spring and late fall, the town gets brown and black, like an old photograph.”
― Blue Balliett, The Danger Box

“Crash, from the Russian krashenina Noun: a rough fabric sometimes used to strengthen the spine of a book”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“Be a squeaky wheel but talk nice”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“It occurred to her that the more you looked at less, the more less became more.”
― Blue Balliett, The Wright 3

“you can pick what you want from the definition, like picking flowers from a garden”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“Dig down, fly high, remember where you want to go, and one day you'll get there: Roots + Wings + Dreams=Home!”
― Blue Balliett, Hold Fast

“Às vezes acho que seria bom ser um fogo de artifício já explodido: seria um alívio.”
― Blue Balliett