Give that man a Pixy Stix," Haddie said. "A what?" Lucia asked. "Hold on." She left then returned a moment later with a handful of colorful straws, one of which she threw at Max like a dart. He caught it in midair. That impressed Haddie and she tossed him another, just to see if he could do it again. He fumbled that one.

Ellen Potter

Categorized in : Men Giving Max

Look, when do the really interesting things happen? Not when you've brushed your teeth and put on your pyjamas and are cozy in bed. They happen when you are cold and uncomfortable and hungry and don't have a roof over your head for the night.

Ellen Potter

roof-over-your-head night interesting

All great adventures have moments that are really crap.

Ellen Potter

moments adventure travel

Memory, in my opinion, is a complete noodle. It hangs on the silliest things but forgets the stuff that really matters.

Ellen Potter

matter stuff memories

It's alarming how quickly people adjust to adventures when they are in one. You really have to work at being astonished by life.

Ellen Potter

adventure people

They [the Hardscrabbles]never enjoyed it when adults playfully lied to them. The adults always think they're being amusing and imaginative, just like children. But kids never lie playfully. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

Ellen Potter

kids lying children

Jeremy used to hate it when she was younger because someone in her class told her redheads were freaks of nature.But our mother told her that redheads were genetically more courageous than other people and that she should always where her hair long,like a wariors badge of honor.

Ellen Potter

hate mother hair

People should have all their big adventures while they're still under the age of fourteen. If you don't, you start to lose your passion for big adventures. It just begins to fade away bit by bit and then you forget you ever wanted adventures in the first place.

Ellen Potter

passion should-have adventure

A lot of times, when I go back to books I loved when I was young, I don't quite understand what it was that I loved about them. Rereading 'The Secret Garden,' I felt a lot like Mary feels when she visits her garden.

Ellen Potter

loved go understand garden

I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me.

Ellen Potter

me experience garden reading

I don't plot my novels - I move along with my characters.

Ellen Potter

novels along move plot

I pretty much always knew I wanted to be a writer. I was writing goofy stories when I was 7 or 8. That was what I call 'wishful-thinking writing.' I grew up in the city and always wanted a horse, but there was no way I was getting a horse. So I wrote all these stories about kids who had horses. It's still fun entering these other worlds.

Ellen Potter

city horse fun way

One professor in college told me flat out I wasn't good enough to enter the creative writing program. I saved that letter and promised myself I would send it back to her when my first book came out.

Ellen Potter

good myself me book

I resisted children's writing for a long time. I saw myself as a writer of literary fiction. But I had so much more fun writing kids' books.

Ellen Potter

myself time long children

I write about two hours a day, and I write in fits and spurts - 45 minutes here, a half-hour there - and when I get stuck, which happens often, I take the dogs for a walk. But during the time when I'm not actually writing, I'm thinking.

Ellen Potter

walk day time thinking

Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.

Ellen Potter

silence business quiet book

I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your 'voice' is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices.

Ellen Potter

your nothing voice giving

If E.B. White were writing in 2013, would there be a 'Charlotte's Web' trailer and an @SomePig Twitter account? I doubt it. Yet, in a way, he'd be missing out because I'm beginning to think that some of this noise is worth making - and some of it is worth hearing, too.

Ellen Potter

beginning think white way