Natalie Babbitt

The shriek cut thinly though the drizzling dimness, holding for a long moment. At last it broadened and dropped to the old.

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

You Don't have to live forever you just have to live.

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.

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

dont be afraid of death, be afraid of the unlived life.

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.

You've got nothing that lasts, you know. That's not the first town that ever stood there. There was one before that, and one before that, and one before that one, on back for 900 years. But this tree has stood here all along. What do you make of that, boy?

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.

Like all magnificent things, it__ very simple.

The first week of August hangs at the very top of the 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. 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 after.

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

...with white dawns and glaring moons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.