Children's books author Natalie Babbitt has died at the age of 84, a publicist from Macmillan Children's Publishing Group confirmed in an email to Bustle. She will perhaps be best remembered for her most popular book, Tuck Everlasting, and she will live on in the hearts and memories of all the children and adults whose lives she touched over the years. If you don't have time to reread one of her books, remember her words through a few of Natalie Babbitt's best quotes.
Born Natalie Zane Moore in Dayton, Ohio, Babbitt grew up drawing. She always wanted to be an illustrator, a goal she did achieve. As both an author and illustrator, she changed the landscape of children's publishing. Her work earned her a Newbery Honor, and she was a finalist for the National Book Award. She was also the winner of the E.B. White Award for Achievement in Children's Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books — Tuck Everlasting, Knee-Knock Rise, The Eyes of Amaryllis, and others — have been beloved for generations, and will continue to be read and reread and remembered and adored for decades to come.
In celebration of her life, here are a few of Natalie Babbitt's best quotes:
“Facts are the barren branches on which we hang the dear, obscuring foliage of our dreams.”
— Kneeknock Rise
“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”
— Tuck Everlasting
“Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is.”
— Tuck Everlasting
“Life's got to be lived, no matter how long or short. You got to take what comes.”
— Tuck Everlasting
“And suddenly, she longed for a thunderstorm.”
— Tuck Everlasting
"“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?”
— Tuck Everlasting
"Of course it's silly," said the Prime Minister impatiently. "But a lot of serious things start silly.”
— The Search for Delicious
“Life always seems to have worries, even if you own a big and beautiful house on the best street in town.”
— The Moon Over High Street
“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.”
— Tuck Everlasting
“Still-there's no use trying to figure why things fall the way they do. Things just are, and fussing don't bring changes.”
— Tuck Everlasting
“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.”
— Tuck Everlasting
"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."
— Tuck Everlasting
