Best 18 quotes of Jacqueline Kelly on MyQuotes

Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.

But my mother's life was a never-ending round of maintenance. Not one single thing did she ever achieve but that it had to be done all over again, one day or one week or one season later. Oh, the monotony.

By 1899, we had learned to tame the darkness but not the Texas heat.

I didn't want anyone getting close to me. I pushed people away. Built a wall around my heart to keep them out. I let one person take down the bricks, and I suppose it was a good idea, but, sometimes, he hurts me too. And it hurts so much worse then any other hurt I've felt because he is one of the very few that matter anymore.

I don't have that many days left," he said as we sat together in the library. "Why would I want to spend them on matters of drainage and overdue accounts? I must husband my hours and spend every one of them wisely. I regret that I didn't come to this realization until I reached fifty years of age. Calpurnia, you would do well to adopt such an attitude at an earlier age. Spend each of your allotted hours with care.

It is better to travel with hope in one's heart than to arrive in safety. . . . We should celebrate today's failure because it is a clear sign that our voyage of discovery is not yet over. The day the experiment succeeds is the day the experiment ends. And I inevitably find that the sadness of ending outweighs the celebration of success.

It means that we should celebrate today's failure because it is a clear sign that our voyage of discovery is not yet over.

It was too bad, but sometimes a little knowledge could ruin your whole day, or at least take off some of the shine.

One day I would have all the books in the world, shelves and shelves of them. I would live my life in a tower of books. I would read all day long and eat peaches. And if any young knights in armor dared to come calling on their white chargers and plead with me to let down my hair, I would pelt them with peach pits until they went home.

See, that's the thing about second chances. It's two people that are there for each other and support each other and care about each other no matter how much they want to deny it. It's about one person doing everything they can to make sure the other doesn't fall and vice-versa. Second chances are about holding on to that other persons hand no matter how hard they beg to let go.

The strongest people in the world are the ones who think they're weak.

They all knew this, but this didn't stop them from good-naturedly crowding around the front door every time it opened, every single time, despite the fact that they were never -EVER- let into the house. I loved this particularly fine thing about dogs: Despite a lifetime of denied entrance, hope never died in their hearts.

We had been so close to missing each other, he and I. He had turned out to be the greatest gift of all.

When two people love each other, they do not comply and does not dominate, only complement each other.

Could anything top the promise and potential of a blank page? What could be more satisfying? Never mind that it would soon be crammed with awkward penmanship, that my handwriting inevitably sloped downhill to the right-hand corner, that I blotted my ink, that my drawings never came out the way I saw them in my head. Never mind all that. What counted was possibility. You could live on possibility, at least for a while.

Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren't given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub.

I had never seen a real live dead person.

It turned out to be a young Dasypus novemcinctus, a nine-banded armadillo, about the size of a small loaf of bread. Although they were becoming more common in Texas, I'd never seen one up close before. Anatomically speaking, it resembled the unhappy melding of an anteater (the face), a mule (the ears), and a tortoise (the carapace). I thought it overall an unlucky creature in the looks department, but Granddaddy once said that to apply a human definition of beauty to an animal that had managed to thrive for millions of years was both unscientific and foolish.