Franny Billingsley

“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?”

“You can outrun your memories, but sometime, you will have to stop. And when you do, there will always be Stepmother, waiting to be remembered.”

“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.”

“Once we got to eating, the idea of happiness returned to me. Not the feeling, the idea. Would a regular girl be happy simply eating a hot meal with a great deal of chew to it? Maybe happiness is a simple thing. Maybe it's as simple as the salty taste of pork, and the vast deal of chewing in it, and how, when the chew is gone, you can still scrape at the bone with your bottom teeth and suck at the marrow.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don't mean to be ungrateful but if someone's out there answering prayers, mine's not at the top of the list”

“You could write your way into happiness. It might not be the happiness you'd experience if Eldric pushed Leanne from a cliff, but there's a firefly glimmer in writing something that would please Rose.”

“I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now. That that’s how we find our way toward meaning. Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.”

“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, it's good enough for a clergyman. But I don't remember that Jesus let his house fall down.”

“Meaning. If you're going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.”

“I have a theory about how she might have managed to pull off such a feat. It comes in the form of an equation: Love + Fear = Herculean Strength. It’s how mothers come to fling runaway motorcars from their children.”

“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.”

“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.”