Top 84 Franny Billingsley Quotes
#2. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#3. Father sighed. "Please spare me these arguments of yours."
"Whose arguments should I use?
Franny Billingsley
#4. Imagine a world without shadows. You cannot touch a shadow, but a world without them is a hard world, and flat.
Franny Billingsley
#5. The boy shall have a proper beating,' said Cecil.
'But I beat him already,' I said, 'and don't tell me I didn't do it properly. I'm touchy about these things.
Franny Billingsley
#6. You could at least complain," I say. "I adore complaining. It calms the nerves.
Franny Billingsley
#7. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#8. I can.
He rent his dark tresses,
Resulting in messes,
Thus prompting his L.I. to flee till,
she reached the end of the world and jumped off.
Perhaps I have untapped potential.
Franny Billingsley
#9. Word magic. If you say a word, it leaps out and becomes the truth. I love you. I believe it. How can something as fragile as a word build itself a whole world?
Franny Billingsley
#10. I turned my peeled-apple face to him. I'd make myself look at him. I owed him that. His touch lingered on my neck as though he'd left a handprint of melted light.
Franny Billingsley
#14. I've confessed to everything and I's liked to be hanged. Now, if you please
Franny Billingsley
#16. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#17. I like rain and mist. I've never understood why people exclaim over bright skies and bushels of glaring sunshine.
Franny Billingsley
#18. Forge ahead, O mighty enforcer of the law. May you be stout of heart and eardrum.
Franny Billingsley
#19. There is a lump of desolation beneath the bony dip at my throat. It is no bigger than a coin, this spot, a peculiarly small place to hold such a feeling. I try to shove it to some deeper region, but there it sticks, a fragile skin-thickness from the outside world.
Franny Billingsley
#20. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#21. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#22. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#24. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#25. My feet are wet," said Mr. Dreary.
"You lack the proper gear," I said. We teetered along a trickle of land that wound between water and mud. "Here in the swamp, even the swans wear rubber boots.
Franny Billingsley
#26. I'd rather be in Hell with my soul and wits, than in the outside world without them.
Franny Billingsley
#28. Our English monarchs are so unimaginative," said Eldric. "They execute people in such tediously conventional ways.
Franny Billingsley
#29. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#30. Poor Cecil. It's hard to be a devil of a fellow in these modern times. No stagecoaches to hold up. No princesses to rescue. Just Petey Todd to escort, while the easy, expert fellow walks the pretty girl home.
Franny Billingsley
#31. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#32. 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?
Franny Billingsley
#33. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#34. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#35. I'm not like that fellow who thought it a far, far better thing to trade his life for that of another. I'm nothing like him: I'd never volunteer to lay my head in the lap of Madame la Guillotine. No, that fellow was a hero and I'm not a hero at all.
Franny Billingsley
#36. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#37. If there were such a thing as a vampire-puppy-dog, it would be Cecil. Big pleading eyes, asking for an ear-scratch and a nice warm bowl of blood.
Franny Billingsley
#38. People think me a sort of Florence Nightingale, but I have no heroic qualities. I simply don't feel very much.
Franny Billingsley
#39. I still can't understand how Cecil and my old tutor, Fitz, got along so well, when we often called Fitz 'the Genius' and avoided calling Cecil anything at all, so as not to be rude.
Franny Billingsley
#40. You mind your tongue!"
"Oh, I do," I said. "I sharpen it every evening on your name.
Franny Billingsley
#41. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#42. The problem I have telling my secret', said Eldric, 'is that it's a secret.
Franny Billingsley
#43. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#44. 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 ...
Franny Billingsley
#46. Smash the table, why don't you? Kick things about. It's ever so nice to see you embrace the true spirit of the Fraternitus.
Franny Billingsley
#48. Let's hope she's like the others, who look only at the surface. Let's hope she'd never think that a girl with black-velvet eyes and cut-glass cheekbones could be a witch.
Franny Billingsley
#49. I don't like my shoes,' said Rose.
'I'm wearing my shoes and you don't see me complain.'
'You only hear a person complain,' said Rose. 'Not see.'
How has Rose lived for seventeen years and no one has killed her, not once?
Franny Billingsley
#50. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#52. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#53. A person might get angry when the girl he loves says she'll never marry.
Franny Billingsley
#54. That's where proper stories begin, don't they, when the handsome stranger arrives and everything goes wrong?
Franny Billingsley
#55. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#56. It's the picnic principle. Things taste better outdoors. And if it's a forbidden thing, so much the better.
Franny Billingsley
#57. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#58. It's strange how a person can have a distinct distaste for herself, but still she clutches on to life.
Franny Billingsley
#59. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#60. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#61. Our parents teach us the very first things we learn. They teach us about hearts.
Franny Billingsley
#62. Should I ever again sink into illness, I'm sure I'll remember Eldric. I'll remember he cared for me. I'll remember that someone had at least taken the time to touch my face.
Franny Billingsley
#63. How many bones did he set?" I cared about it much less than they did. It's my Florence Nightingale calm, I suppose.
There was a pause.
"Twenty-seven," said Father.
There was a question mark in that pause. "How many bones are in the hand?"
Another pause.
"Twenty-seven," said Eldric.
Franny Billingsley
#64. Is this what a nun feels when she runs wild? Perhaps running wild needn't mean dressing in satin and taking to cigarettes. It might mean running into the wild, into the real, into the ooze and muck and the clean, muddy smell of life.
Franny Billingsley
#65. How true, lamentably true. I'm sorry, Father. I do not love my neighbor as myself.
Franny Billingsley
#66. 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?
Franny Billingsley
#68. Soon the Boggy Mun would open up shop. I wore no cloak and had no pockets. I carried my knife and salt in a basket. Little Red Riding Hood, skipping off into the woods. And whom will she meet?
Why, her own self, of course: the wolf.
Franny Billingsley
#69. Darling! Had they darlinged each other when they were here? I imagined them, magnificent on horseback, tossing darlings to and fro.
Franny Billingsley
#70. Briony scared?" said Eldric. "I've never seen anyone less scared in my life. She has nerves of iron.
Franny Billingsley
#71. Eldric wore his lazy lion's smile. He didn't mind what he was called. He was a sticks-and-stones sort of person.
Franny Billingsley
#72. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#73. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#75. You don't mind when he stares at you." Cecil jerked his head toward Eldric.
"He doesn't stare," I said. "He looks.
Franny Billingsley
#77. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#78. A girl can have the face of an angel but have a horrid sort of heart.
Franny Billingsley
#79. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#80. Sometimes, of course, the sister's the wicked one, not the stepmother.
Franny Billingsley
#81. My own mask stayed just where it ought. I've had lots of practice.
Franny Billingsley
#82. A toast at your wedding, perhaps?" said Eldric.
"I shall never get married," I said. "But I do like champagne.
Franny Billingsley
#83. 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.
Franny Billingsley
#84. I don't mean to be ungrateful but if someone's out there answering prayers, mine's not at the top of the list
Franny Billingsley
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