Carry on reading…

 “Learn a little patience. You never know what might be around the corner.” – Chris D’Lacey (The Fire Within)

“Go back?” he thought. “No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!” So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.” – J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit)

“Patience is waiting. Not passively waiting. That is laziness. But to keep going when the going is hard and slow – that is patience. The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” – Leo Tolstoy (author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace)

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” – A.A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh)

“Life is like crossing a river. If you take a huge step-aim for too bigger dreams-then the current will knock you off your feet and carry you away. The way to do it is small steps, you will take hold of life. You will get there in the end.” – Louis Sachar (author of Holes)

“The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly–we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone’s life.” – Joseph Bruchac (author of Bearwalker and Code Talker)

“As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that the things that are truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. Courage and kindness, loyalty, truth, and helpfulness are always the same and always needed.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder (author of Little House on the Prairie)

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.” – Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)

“Patience, he thought. So much of this was patience – waiting, and thinking and doing things right. So much of all this, so much of all living was patience and thinking.” – Gary Paulsen (Hatchet)

“Waiting and hoping is a hard thing to do when you’ve already been waiting and hoping for almost as long as you can bear it.” – Jenny Nimmo (Charlie Bone and the Time Twister)

“Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 “… you don’t learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.” – Markus Zusak (Underdog)

More than One Perspective

“Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and — if at all possible — speak a few sensible words.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“Perspective was my secret weapon, and books gave me plenty of ammunition.”  Ian McNulty


“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.” C.S. Lewis in The Magician’s Nephew


“Child, you have to learn to see things in the right proportions. Learn to see great things great and small things small.” Corrie ten Boom

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.” Frances Hodgson Burnett in The Secret Garden


“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”  J.M. Barrie

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.” Robertson Davies

Click HERE to read novels told from more than one perspective.

Drawings courtesy of grade eight students: Raelyn, Dana, Calvin, Griffin, Josh and Agnes.