Favorite Quote from Wolf Hollow

Activity Overview

Having students choose a favorite quote or scene from the book allows them to express which parts of the story resonated with them on a personal level. In this way, students are making a text-to-self connection that demonstrates their understanding of the characters and their development or the themes of the novel. Students can share their storyboards afterwards and have a short discussion about what the quotes mean to them.

Some students may end up choosing the same quote, but have different perspectives. This is always interesting for students to see and can open up a discussion as to how not everyone can read the same lines in the same way based on their own perspectives and personal experiences.

Examples of Quotes from Wolf Hollow

"The year I turned twelve, I learned how to lie."

“The year I turned twelve, I learned that what I said and what I did mattered. So much, sometimes, that I wasn't sure I wanted such a burden. But I took it anyway, and I carried it as best I could.”

“It was the autumn of 1943 when my steady life began to spin, not only because of the war that had drawn the whole world into a screaming brawl, but also because of the dark-hearted girl who came to our hills and changed everything.”

“And I decided that there might be things I would never understand, no matter how hard I tried. Though, try I would. And that there would be people who would never hear my one small voice, no matter what I had to say. But then a better thought occurred, and this was the one I carried away with me that day: If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could?"

“But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.”

“But think about how it feels when your hands are so cold they go numb. How it's only when they start to thaw out that you realize how much they hurt.”

“Our old barn taught me one of the most important lessons I was ever to learn: that the extraordinary can live in the simplest things"

“Anyone who's ever gone from warm and bright to cold and dark knows how I felt."

“And that's when I felt the first wave of sorrow that came from keeping a new secret.”

“Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.”

“...I'd rather know too much than too little"

“My father looked from my mother to me, his eyes full of questions. What should we do now? How are we supposed to know what to do now? I wasn't sure, either. But I knew I couldn't spend one more minute doing nothing. I knew I couldn't grow up and live a long life with the knowledge that I had not done what I could. Right now. Before it once again made no difference.

“At times, I was so confused that I felt like the stem of a pinwheel surrounded by whir and clatter, but through that whole unsettling time I knew that it would not do to hide in the barn with a book and an apple and let events plunge forward without me.”

“All around us, birds woke up the sky.”

“I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard.”

“I slept so long and hard that when my mother woke me the next morning I was a stranger to myself.”

“Some of them would survive to become fruit as good as anything on earth. Others would wither on the branch, killed by frost, wasted.”

“We spent some time like that, me asking small questions, Toby giving me longer and longer answers, until we were simply talking, Toby asking me questions, too.”

“My name is Tobias Jordan. I am a carpenter from Maryland. And I did not push Betty down that well.”

“We girls in the 4-H club had made a flag to hang in the church, adding a blue star every time someone from the township went off to fight. When one of them died, we changed the blue star to a gold one. Just two, so far, but I had been to their funerals, and I knew there was no "just" about it.”

“school wouldn’t help them fight the Germans.”

“A wolf is not a dog and never will be […] no matter how you raise it.”