If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
Katherine PatersonRead
She had tricked him. She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then before he was really at home in it but too late to go back, she had left him stranded there--like an astronaut wandering about on the moon. Alone.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the feelings of abandonment and isolation after a profound emotional change brought on by another person.
In this quote, Katherine Paterson encapsulates the emotional turmoil of feeling deceived and abandoned after undergoing a significant transformation due to a relationship. It highlights the vulnerability that comes with letting someone into your life and the deep sense of loss and isolation that can follow when they leave, likening the experience to an astronaut stranded in an alien world, unable to return to familiarity.
Themes
AbandonmentTransformationIsolationRelationshipsLoss
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be shared during a talk on the complexity of human relationships.
More from Katherine Paterson
All quotes →It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.
Katherine PatersonRead
Children have to have access to books, and a lot of children can't go to a store and buy a book. We need not only our public libraries to be funded properly and staffed properly, but our school libraries. Many children can't get to a public library, and the only library they have is a school library.
Katherine PatersonRead
We are trying to communicate that which lies in our deepest heart, which has no words, which can only be hinted at through the means of a story. And somehow, miraculously, a story that comes from deep in my heart calls from a reader that which is deepest in his or her heart, and together from our secret hidden selves we create a story that neither of us could have told alone.
Katherine PatersonRead
The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.
Katherine PatersonRead
The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.
Katherine PatersonRead
Similar quotes
It was a strange thing, to still be in love with your wife and to not know if you liked her. What would happen when this was all over? Could you forgive someone if she hurt you and the people you love, if she truly believed she was only trying to help? I had filed for divorce, but that wasn't what I really wanted. What I really wanted was for all of us to go back two years, and start over. Had I ever really told her that?
Jodi PicoultRead
Men rarely worry about using or being used because all relationships work that way. A man perceives himself as owning and being owned by a woman. 'Use' is a dirty word only when there's an imbalance in the relationship.
Warren FarrellRead
Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.
Daniel MendelsohnRead
Economically as well as emotionally, modern marriage has become like an affluent gated community. It has become harder for low-income Americans to enter and sustain.
Stephanie CoontzRead
But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.
Margaret AtwoodRead
The elephant, not only the largest but the most intelligent of animals, provides us with an excellent example. It is faithful and tenderly loving to the female of its choice, mating only every third year and then for no more than five days, and so secretly as never to be seen, until, on the sixth day, it appears and goes at once to wash its whole body in the river, unwilling to return to the herd until thus purified. Such good and modest habits are an example to husband and wife.
Saint Francis De SalesRead