Top 50 Eva Ibbotson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.”

— Eva Ibbotson

2. “When you’re sad, my Little Star, go out of doors. It’s always better underneath the open sky.”

— Eva Ibbotson

3. “Just because we’ve never done it doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”

— Eva Ibbotson

4. “Shadows are cool and peaceful places for those whose minds are overstocked with treasure.”

— Eva Ibbotson

5. “What are you afraid of then? Not Being able to see, I think not seeing because your obsessed by something that blots out the world.”

— Eva Ibbotson

6. “For whether a place is a heaven or a hell rests in yourself, and those who go with courage may find themselves in paradise.”

— Eva Ibbotson

7. “Kidnapping children is not a good idea. All the same, sometimes it has to be done.”

— Eva Ibbotson

8. “It’s true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get in a person’s blood even if he doesn’t remember having them.”

— Eva Ibbotson

9. “One must not judge other cultures by the standars of one’s one,′ said Aunt Hilda.”

— Eva Ibbotson

10. “For an instant she felt his touch on her cheek then he stepped back. There that was my ration for all eternity. People have died for less I dare say.”

— Eva Ibbotson

11. “It was only when the light in her eyes was extinguished, at the mention of her father, that Rupert realized how brightly it had burned.”

— Eva Ibbotson

12. “Miss Minton knew she was going to be dismissed, and she thought this was perfectly fair. A governess who let her charge sail up the rivers of the Amazon and live with Indian tribes could hardly expect to keep her job.”

— Eva Ibbotson

13. “To this waltz, born in a distant, snowbound country out of longing for just such a flower-scented summer night as this, Rupert and Anna dance. They were under no illusions. The glittering chandeliers, the gold mirrors with their draped acanthus leaves, the plangent violins might be the stuff of romance, but this was no romance. It was a moment in a lifeboat before it sank beneath the waves; a walk across the sunlit courtyard towards the firing squad. This waltz was all they had.”

— Eva Ibbotson

14. “Would you like me to stop talking? Because I can. I have to concentrate, but it’s possible.”

— Eva Ibbotson

15. “Once the hag got upset she was apt to go downhill very fast and remember things like she was an orphan. People are often orphans when they are eighty-two, but it is true that when you have no mother or father you can feel very lonely at any age.”

— Eva Ibbotson

16. “Then she washed and dressed very attentively, putting on high-heeled court shoes, silk stockings, a black skirt and crisply ironed white blouse, because she was Viennese and one dressed properly even when one’s world had ended.”

— Eva Ibbotson

17. “People make their own worlds.”

— Eva Ibbotson

18. “To show too much joy in a place such as this would be unseemly but, as he padded toward her, his tail was extended in a manner which would make wagging possible should all go as expected.”

— Eva Ibbotson

19. “We mustn’t only remember the good bits,” she said. “We must remember the bad bits, too, so that we know it was real.”

— Eva Ibbotson

20. “It was his time with the Xanti which had changed him. They thought that everyone’s life was like a river; you had to flow with the current and not struggle, which wasted breath and made you more likely to drown.”

— Eva Ibbotson

21. “Duty exists and it’s real. It means sharing any gift or talent that you have with people who need it. It means not being afraid or selfish or tight – but open.”

— Eva Ibbotson

22. “But of course he knew, all of them knew. There is only one kind of a person a wizard can marry, and that is a witch.”

— Eva Ibbotson

23. “After all, Betty was ill and she was her sister, and she wouldn’t be able to shave her legs for weeks because of the plaster.”

— Eva Ibbotson

24. “Slowly, Anna put up a hand to his muzzle and began to scratch that spot behind the ear where large dogs keep their souls.”

— Eva Ibbotson

25. “This is worse than Hollywood, he thought. A girl comes in with a pork chop and I write a song for her.”

— Eva Ibbotson

26. “She realized that adventures, once they were over, were things that had to stay inside one – that no one else could quite understand.”

— Eva Ibbotson

27. “The Unconscious, lately discovered by Professor Freud and used by others to store their joys, fears and frustrations, was for Nerine a gigantic subterranean wardrobe.”

— Eva Ibbotson

28. “And so they played some of the world’s loveliest piano music – the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.”

— Eva Ibbotson

29. “The news should have terrified her, but it was difficult to be frightened of anything when she was sitting so close to Rom. ‘I thought we had convinced him that I was leading a blameless life?’ ‘We had, till you burst out of that damnable cake.”

— Eva Ibbotson

30. “There are those who dance the notes, and those who dance the music.”

— Eva Ibbotson

31. “There had, of course, been no golden-haired boys; there hadn’t been any boys at all. What there had been was a leper colony, run by the Brothers of Saint Patrick, a group of Irish missionaries to whom the crows had been sent.”

— Eva Ibbotson

32. “Do I know everything about him already? she thought, bewildered. And back came the answer: Everything. You are branded with this knowledge, you will have it for the rest of time.”

— Eva Ibbotson

33. “People who’ve suffered don’t have time to grumble.”

— Eva Ibbotson

34. “But she had to know words. She had to know everything.”

— Eva Ibbotson

35. “Smells are odd things. They follow you about when you’re not thinking about them, but when you put your nose to where they ought to be, they aren’t there. The.”

— Eva Ibbotson

36. “Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.”

— Eva Ibbotson

37. “When we’re grown up I’ll come back for you, I promise. No one can stop us then.”

— Eva Ibbotson

38. “If you want something enough you usually get it. But you have to take what goes with it.”

— Eva Ibbotson

39. “When you know what you want you usually get it.”

— Eva Ibbotson

40. “It was a night to dream about: windless, warm and scented, with a streak of gold and amethyst still lingering in the sky.”

— Eva Ibbotson

41. “Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood – it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”

— Eva Ibbotson

42. “He felt her hand creep from her muff into his pocket as they walked the snowy streets to buy their Christmas tree; dusted the pollen off her nose after he had brought her the first king-cups. By the gay and gilded fountains of Peterhof they bandied preposterous names for their unborn child. At night, in their big wooden bed, he watched her spoon cherry jam into her tea and told her that her habits were disgusting, that he loved her more than life itself.”

— Eva Ibbotson

43. “She wanted to make him swear; to have a kind of ceremony – but then she saw his face as he looked out over the Island and saw that he loved it as she did, and she knew for certain they would both be back.”

— Eva Ibbotson

44. “It is a fearful thing to love what time can touch.”

— Eva Ibbotson

45. “Now, tell me everything, please. Of course if he has harmed you I shall kill him, whoever he is,” he added matter-of-factly. “But otherwise, perhaps something can be done.”

— Eva Ibbotson

46. “They’re a jolly lot, the lepers,” said Father Liam. “People who’ve suffered don’t have time to grumble.”

— Eva Ibbotson

47. “If this is the ‘Green Hell’ of the Amazon, then hell is where I belong,” said Maia.”

— Eva Ibbotson

48. “It was too much... the gods would not permit such joy.”

— Eva Ibbotson

49. “A countess, eh?” Mr. Cameron, into whose ear trumpet the news had duly been shouted, had begun to wheeze with unaccustomed and silent laughter. He knew, now, what to call his new rose, and the joke – obscure, private, pointless – was just the kind he particularly enjoyed.”

— Eva Ibbotson

50. “To this largesse had been added waist-length golden, curling hair which, had she chosen to sit on a rock brushing it, must have sent every sailor within miles plunging to his doom.”

— Eva Ibbotson