Natalie Babbitt Quotes

Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.

Life's got to be lived, no matter how long or short. You got to take what comes.

The sea can swallow ships, and it can spit out whales like watermelon seeds. It will take what it wants, and it will keep what it has taken, and you may not take away from it what it does not wish to give.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning.

Still-there's no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don't bring changes.

Don't fear death, fear the un-lived life

Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.

But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing.

It'd be nice to have a new name, to start with, one that's not all worn out from being called so much.

in reading ... stories, you can be many different people in many different places, doing things you would never have a chance to do in ordinary life. It's amazing that those twenty-six little marks of the alphabet can arrange themselves on the pages of a book and accomplish all that. Readers are lucky - they will never be bored or lonely.

Time is like a wheel. Turning and turning - never stopping. And the woods are the center; the hub of the wheel. It began the first week of summer, a strange and breathless time when accident, or fate, bring lives together. When people are led to do things, they've never done before. On this summersday, not so very long ago, the wheel set lives in motion in mysterious ways.

Nothing seems interesting when it belongs to you, only when it doesn't.

The only thing I would want to say is that storytelling is ancient; it's something that everybody does. Kids mustn't be in awe of it. Reading should be a joy - fun, fun, fun - not a responsibility, not something you do because society demands it, but something you do because it's a pleasure.

You dont have to live forever just live.

For some, time passes slowly. An hour can seem like an eternity. For others, there was never enough. For Jesse Tuck, it didn't exist.

my mother always found me out. Always. She's been dead for thirty-five years, but I have this feeling that even now she's watching.

People got to do something useful if they're going to take up space in the world.

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.

I have a wonderful husband, and we have had a great life.

Living's heavy work, but off to one side the way we are, it's useless, too. It don't make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I'd do it in a minute. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.

Right after graduation, I married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, an academic administrator. I spent the next ten years in Connecticut, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., raising our children, Christopher, Tom, and Lucy.

the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color. Often at night there is lightning, but it quivers all alone. There is no thunder, no relieving rain. These are strange and breathless days, the dog days, when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for.

I was born and raised in Ohio. During my childhood, I spent most of my time drawing and reading fairy tales and myths.