Franny Billingsley
Witches don’t look like anything. Witches are. Witches do.Collection: Looks
Even a witch wants sympathy.Collection: Sympathy
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?Collection: Believe
This is what I want. I want people to take care of me. I want them to force comfort upon me. I want the soft-pillow feeling that I associate with memories of being ill when I was younger, soft pillows and fresh linens and satin-edged blankets and hot chocolate. It's not so much the comfort itself as knowing there's someone who wants to take care of you.Collection: Memories
When we were small, Rose and I used to play a game called connect the dots. I loved it. I loved drawing a line from dot number 1 to dot number 2 and so on. Most of all, I loved the moment when the chaotic sprinkle of dots resolved itself into a picture. That's what stories do. They connect the random dots of life into a picture. But it's all an illusion. Just try to connect the dots of life. You'll end up with a lunatic scribble.Collection: Games
I should hate to be a regular girl with a sugar-plum voice. I should hate to have swan-like lashes, and a thick, sooty neck. I sound as though I’m joking, I know, but I should truly hate to be like Leanne, so charming and ordinary and stuffed with clichéd feelings. I’m glad I’m the ice maiden. Who wants to be crying over every stray dog? Not I. Scratch my surface and what do you see? More surface.Collection: Girl
People think me a sort of Florence Nightingale, but I have no heroic qualities. I simply don’t feel very much.Collection: Thinking
Poor Petey. I’d like to say I could almost feel a tender spot for poor Petey, but the truth is I’d rather feel at the tender spot on his head and give it a poke.Collection: Giving
Did I kill him?” I said. “No, miss,” said Robert. “Pity.Collection: Missing
Now that’s true poetic irony. I rush into battle to defend the fair name of Rose Larkin, and what does she do but fetch Robert to stop me.Collection: Names
Despite her cough, Rose was in unusually good spirits. That was irritating. If I’m to trade my life for Rose’s, I’d appreciate her exhibiting a touch of melancholy. Also acceptable would be despair.Collection: Appreciate
Eavesdropping is such a regular-person activity.Collection: Persons
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.Collection: Mean
I like rain and mist. I've never understood why people exclaim over bright skies and bushels of glaring sunshine.Collection: Rain
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!Collection: Intelligent
But witchy magic doesn’t listen to please and pretty please, and anyway, I didn’t really care. I only pretended to care because not caring makes me a monster.Collection: Caring
Our English monarchs are so unimaginative,” said Eldric. “They execute people in such tediously conventional ways.Collection: People
I’m not really the sacrificing type.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Water
That’s where proper stories begin, don’t they, when the handsome stranger arrives and everything goes wrong?Collection: Stories
You could at least complain,” I say. “I adore complaining. It calms the nerves.Collection: Complaining
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.Collection: Sound
I hope you don’t mind my joining you,” said Leanne. I minded. After all, she’d tried to kill me. A girl in a novel would say it was hard to believe, but it wasn’t.Collection: Girl
Thoughts are strange creatures. They lead you from one thing to another. Sometimes you don’t know how you got from one to the next.Collection: Next
Blast Cecil!” said Eldric. “You have my permission,” I said.Collection: Permission
Perhaps you should put your head down.” I knew this was the thing to do, although I’ve never fainted and I don’t intend to.Collection: Should
Boxing’s not that straightforward,” said Eldric. “You can practice and practice, but the real experience will always be different. Lots of things are like that, actually.Collection: Real
I am entirely well,” said Eldric, “which has Dr. Rannigan exploring first one theory, then another, trying to understand. But not being a man of science, I don’t care about understanding. I simply want to go outside and break a few windows.Collection: Men
He scooped up my arm, swung me round. “Let go, Cecil,” I said. “I’ve a strange dislike of being forced.” “But Briony,” he said, “I’m so full of good spirits. I could walk to London, I think!” Why didn’t he?Collection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Wine
Life and stories are alike in one way: They are full of hollows. The king and queen have no children: They have a child hollow. The girl has a wicked stepmother: She has a mother hollow. In a story, a baby comes along to fill the child hollow. But in life, the hollows continue empty.Collection: Girl
Father sighed. “Please spare me these arguments of yours.” “Whose arguments should I use?Collection: Father
A girl can have the face of an angel but have a horrid sort of heart.Collection: Girl
Yes, I'm shallow, I don't mind admitting it. Perhaps I should admit that there's no end to the depths of my shallowness.Collection: Mind
The beach has a language of its own, with its undulating ribbons of silt, the imponderable hieroglyphs of bird tracks. The receding waves catch on innumerable holes in the sand. Bubbles form and fade. A new language, with a new alphabet.Collection: Beach
It's strange how a person can have a distinct distaste for herself, but still she clutches on to life.Collection: Strange
I was asking about lust, wasnʼt I? I was fairly certain of it. But isnʼt love supposed to come before lust? It does in the dictionary.Collection: Lust
Death had no lips, but it was smilingCollection: Lips
Actually, it would be assumed that the young lady had no such impulses at all, but I’ll tell you something: Chocolate melts on my tongue too.Collection: Chocolate
I have some questions about betrayal,” I said. “Think about this: A person who calls you his best friend, and says he has dinner plans with you, goes off with a beautiful woman, saying he’ll be back directly, then makes you wait half an hour because he’s kissing the woman in the alley. Is that betrayal?” “Oh, Lord.” Eldric tossed back his wine.Collection: Beautiful
I might be a wicked girl who'd think nothing of eating a baby for breakfast, but I'd never allow myself to get expelled. It's far too public.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Mean
It's one thing to keep secrets. It's quite another to lie.Collection: Lying
It is true that I can trip over anything and nothing – a speck of dust, a patch of sunlight, an idea. I move through life like a person with one eye, through a landscape that looks flat, but is really tricked out with hidden depths and shallows. It didn’t use to be so, but no matter. I navigate the world well enough in my own way.Collection: Moving
I don't mean to be ungrateful but if someone's out there answering prayers, mine's not at the top of the listCollection: Prayer
Imagine a world without shadows. You cannot touch a shadow, but a world without them is a hard world, and flat.Collection: Shadow
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.Collection: Eye
If you don't argue, you can't give in.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Games