Eva Ibbotson was born 21 January 1925, and died 20 October 2010.
10 Quotes
- It’s true that adventures are good for people even when they are very young. Adventures can get in a person’s blood even if he doesn’t remember having them.
- Just because we’ve never done it doesn’t mean we can’t do it.
- I started as a short-story writer and I was over 40 before I wrote my first full-length book. It was a book for children: The Great Ghost Rescue. Since then I have written children and adult books alternately.
- When I get stuck in a book now, I usually try putting an aunt in. I find it difficult to write a book without aunts.
- The kind of dichotomy between honour and passion is as old as the hills and I must say getting my heroes out of their dilemmas has sometimes not been easy.
- I try to imagine an actual person I am trying to entertain, whether a child or an adult, and write directly to them, rather than to a general reader.
- I was always on some large train going about and wishing I had a home. So when I came to write, consciously or unconsciously I always had to make things right for the hero or the heroine.
- Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood – it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.
- You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair.
- One must not judge other cultures by the standards of one’s own.
Eva Ibbotson was an Austrian-born British novelist, known for writing for children She wrote many books including Which Witch?, The Secret of Platform 13, and Dial-a-Ghost. She won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize for Journey to the River Sea.
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