Like all magnificent things, it’s very simple.

I grew up wanting only to be an illustrator. I studied art at Laurel School in Cleveland and at Smith College.

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

I have a wonderful husband, and we have had a great life.

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...

I have always loved astronomy, and being an astronomer once lurked in the back of my mind. But I was never good at algebra. In fact, I flunked it twice in high school.

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....

My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn’t want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the...

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

The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I’d written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so...

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

I write for children because I am interested in fantasy and the possibilities for experience of all kinds before the time of compromise. I believe that children are far more perceptive and wise than American...

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...

My mother was an artist, and I was fairly good at art as a child. I was always the best drawer in class, except in second grade when an artistic genius passed through our school!

I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a book illustrator. I used to hurry home from school and draw.

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.

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

We human beings do a lot of dumb things, and war is certainly the dumbest.

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.

I had a wonderful mother who wanted my sister and me to have everything, even though money was a very prominent thing we didn’t have. But we had a very happy childhood – pretty much...

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

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