Top 70 Natalie Babbitt Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Natalie Babbitt

2. “Don’t fear death, fear the un-lived life.”

— Natalie Babbitt

3. “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.”

— Natalie Babbitt

4. “Like all magnificent things, it’s very simple.”

— Natalie Babbitt

5. “Readers are lucky – they will never be bored or lonely.”

— Natalie Babbitt

6. “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.”

— Natalie Babbitt

7. “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.”

— Natalie Babbitt

8. “People got to do something useful if they’re going to take up space in the world.”

— Natalie Babbitt

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

— Natalie Babbitt

10. “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.”

— Natalie Babbitt

11. “Nothing seems interesting when it belongs to you, only when it doesn’t.”

— Natalie Babbitt

12. “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.”

— Natalie Babbitt

13. “Always moving around and never having any friends or anything.”

— Natalie Babbitt

14. “Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short. You got to take what comes.”

— Natalie Babbitt

15. “No connection, you would agree. But things can come together in strange ways. The wood was at the center, the hub of the wheel. All wheels must have a hub. A ferris wheel has one, as the sun is the hub of the wheeling calendar. Fixed points they are, and best left undisturbed, for without them, nothing holds together. But sometimes people find this out too late.”

— Natalie Babbitt

16. “The people would have noticed the giant ash tree at the center of the wood, and then, in time, they’d have noticed the little spring bubbling up among its roots in spite of the pebbles piled there to conceal it. And that would have been a disaster so immense that this weary old earth, owned or not to its fiery core, would have trembled on its axis like a beetle on a pin.”

— Natalie Babbitt

17. “I was having that dream again, the good one where we’re all in heaven and never heard of Treegap.”

— Natalie Babbitt

18. “For the wood was full of light, entirely different from the light she was used to. It was green and amber and alive, quivering in splotches on the padded ground, fanning into sturdy stripes between the tree trunks. There were little flowers she did not recognize, white and palest blue; and endless, tangled vines; and here and there a fallen log, half rotted but soft with patches of sweet green-velvet moss.”

— Natalie Babbitt

19. “The first week of August was long over. And now, though autumn was still some weeks away, there was a feeling that the year had begun its downward arc, that the wheel was turning again, slowly now, but soon to go faster, turning once more in its changeless sweep of change.”

— Natalie Babbitt

20. “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.”

— Natalie Babbitt

21. “Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short,” she said calmly. “You got to take what comes. We just go along, like everybody else, one day at a time.”

— Natalie Babbitt

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

— Natalie Babbitt

23. “You Don’t have to live forever you just have to live.”

— Natalie Babbitt

24. “The sky was a ragged blaze of red and pink and orange, and its double trembled on the surface of the pond like color spilled from a paintbox.”

— Natalie Babbitt

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

— Natalie Babbitt

26. “I got a feeling this whole thing is going to come apart like wet bread.”

— Natalie Babbitt

27. “I’m not exactly sure what I’d do, you know, but something interesting – something that’s all mine. Something that would make some kind of difference in the world. It’d be nice to have a new name, to start with, one that’s not all worn out from being called so much.”

— Natalie Babbitt

28. “That’s what us Tucks are, Winnie. Stuck so’s we can’t move on. We ain’t part of the wheel no more. Dropped off, Winnie. Left behind. And everywhere around us, things is moving and growing and changing.”

— Natalie Babbitt

29. “For, through the twilight sounds of crickets and sighing trees, a faint, surprising wisp of music came floating to them and all three turned toward it, toward the wood.”

— Natalie Babbitt

30. “Outside, the night seemed poised on tiptoe, waiting, waiting, holding its breath for the storm.”

— Natalie Babbitt

31. “And soon they were rolling on again, leaving Treegap behind, and as they went, the tinkling little melody of a music box drifted out behind them and was lost at last far down the road.”

— Natalie Babbitt

32. “Mae Tuck must never go to the gallows. Whatever happened to the man in the yellow suit, Mae Tuck must not be hanged. Because if all they had said was true, then Mae, even if she were the cruelest of murderers and deserved to be put to death – Mae Tuck would not be able to die.”

— Natalie Babbitt

33. “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.”

— Natalie Babbitt

34. “Winnie did not believe in fairy tales. She had never longed for a magic wand, did not expect to marry a prince, and was scornful – most of the time – of her grandmother’s elves. So now she sat, mouth open, wide-eyed, not knowing what to make of this extraordinary story. It couldn’t – not a bit of it – be true. And yet:.”

— Natalie Babbitt

35. “Mae Tuck, and her husband, and Miles and Jesse, too, had all looked exactly the same for eighty-seven years.”

— Natalie Babbitt

36. “And then sometimes it comes over me and I wonder why it happened to us. We’re plain as salt, us Tucks. We don’t deserve no blessings – if it is a blessing. And, likewise, I don’t see how we deserve to be cursed, if it’s a curse. Still – there’s no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don’t bring changes.”

— Natalie Babbitt

37. “A fresh breeze lifted Winnie’s hair, and from somewhere in the village behind them a dog barked.”

— Natalie Babbitt

38. “And Winnie, laughing at him, lost the last of her alarm. They were friends, her friends. She was running away after all, but she was not alone. Closing.”

— Natalie Babbitt

39. “You really have to love words if you’re going to be a writer, because as a writer, you certainly spend a lot of time with words.”

— Natalie Babbitt

40. “He looked solid, like an oar, whereas Jesse – well, she decided, Jesse was like water: thin, and quick.”

— Natalie Babbitt

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

— Natalie Babbitt

42. “And finally she had sobbed the only truth there was into her mother’s shoulder, the only explanation: the Tucks were her friends. She had done it because – in spite of everything, she loved them.”

— Natalie Babbitt

43. “Pretty’ doesn’t mean ‘good,’ you know, Geneva. Real life isn’t like fairy tales. ‘Pretty’ simply means that by accident you’ve got things arranged on your outside in an extra-pleasing manner. It doesn’t tell a thing about your inside.”

— Natalie Babbitt

44. “She was able to believe in this because she needed to; and, believing, was her own true, promising friend once more.”

— Natalie Babbitt

45. “Closing the gate on her oldest fears as she had closed the gate of her own fenced yard, she discovered the wings she’d always wished she had.”

— Natalie Babbitt

46. “Wordy! I enjoy description – I like words, and words are the tools that writers use, just like paint is the tool that artists use. I think words are fun, and I have a lot of fun using them. I know that a lot of kids think my stories start very slowly, and I expect that’s true. But that’s the way I like to read stories, so when I’m writing them I can do what I want! I say that to kids in schools, and they are very generous – they say, “That’s true. You can do what you want. It’s your story.”

— Natalie Babbitt

47. “Life’s got to be lived, no matter how long or short.”

— Natalie Babbitt

48. “The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”

— Natalie Babbitt

49. “Now, remember Winifred, don’t bite your fingernails. Don’t interrupt when someone else is speaking, and don’t go down to the jailhouse at midnight to change places with Prisoners.”

— Natalie Babbitt

50. “Midville’s best street was High Street. It was up on a hill. Not much of a hill, to tell the truth, but in that part of the state, the flat south-central part, hills are not taken for granted.”

— Natalie Babbitt