Franny Billingsley (born July 3, 1954) is the author of three award-winning children's fantasy novels, Well Wished, The Folk Keeper, and Chime, and the picture book Big Bad Bunny.
I explained we lost the porch to the flood. Father hasn't gotten around to rebuilding it, although he's quite a good carpenter. He says if Jesus was a carpenter, its good enough for a clergyman. But I don't remember that Jesus let his house fall down.
It’s one thing if a person learns you’re a witch. It’s quite another if he learns you’re a murderer. I almost forget I’m a witch now that I know I’m a murderer—murderess, actually. Murderess sounds so much worse.
A poem doesn’t come out and tell you what it has to say. It circles back on itself, eating its own tail and making you guess what it means.
Father’s silence is not merely the absence of sound. It’s a creature with a life of its own. It chokes you. It pinches you small as a grain of rice. It twists in your gut like a worm. Silence clawed at my throat. It left a taste of burnt matches.
I don't know what it is, but I ache for it each day. It's as though I have eyes, but there are colors I cannot see. As though I have ears, but there's a range of notes I cannot hear.
We laughed a lot and I grew warmer still, lovely and warm. I do realize that some of that warmth was due to the wine, but there was much more to it than that. There are two distinct aspects to Communion wine: one aspect is the wine itself, the other is the idea of communion. Wine is certainly warming, but communion is a great deal more so.
Witches don’t look like anything. Witches are. Witches do.
Secrets press inside a person. They press the way water presses at a dam. The secrets and the water, they both want to get out.
He’s harmless, poor thing. That’s what everyone said. It was true, but who cares? Lots of people are harmless, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.
It's one thing to keep secrets. It's quite another to lie.
There are no preconditions for jealousy. You don't have to be right, you don't have to be reasonable. Take Othello. He was neither right nor reasonable, and Desdemona ended up dead. I wouldn't mind Leanne ending up dead. I wouldn't mind exploding her into fireworks of peacock and pearl.
Father sighed. “Please spare me these arguments of yours. ” “Whose arguments should I use?
It wasn't quite a question. It was more of an invitation to tell him whatever I chose. Eldric game me a choice, and it was this that made me want to tell him everything.
When Rose takes to screaming, she starts loud, continues loud, and ends loud. Rose has a very good ear and always screams on the same note. I'd tested her before I burnt the library, and our piano along with it. Rose screams on the note B flat. We don't need a piano anymore now that we have a human tuning fork.
If you say a word, it leaps out and becomes the truth. I love you. I believe it. I believe I am loveable. How can something as fragile as a word build a whole world?
I don’t mind the disapproving ones so much. It’s the tolerant ones I can’t stand, the ones who smile at Rose, who speak to her ever so slowly and gently. They don’t realize how very intelligent Rose really is. They’re just terrifically pleased with themselves. Look at me! they all but shout. See how broad-minded I am! How wonderfully progressive, how fantastically twentieth century!
That’s where proper stories begin, don’t they, when the handsome stranger arrives and everything goes wrong?
Meaning. If you're going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.