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Natalie Babbitt

  • ... one of the buds on the rosebush opened into a blossom, white and silky as a baby's fist.

  • ... 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.

  • 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.

  • Nothing ever seems interesting when it belongs to you — only when it doesn't.

  • 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.

  • ... 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.

    • Natalie Babbitt,
    • in Ann McCallum, Language Arts Today ()
  • My childhood is very vivid to me, and I don't feel very different now from the way I felt then. It would appear I am the very same person, only with wrinkles.

    • Natalie Babbitt,
    • in The Horn Book ()
  • ... 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.

    • Natalie Babbitt,
    • in The Horn Book ()

Natalie Babbitt, U.S. writer, illustrator, Newbery winner

(1932)