Franny Billingsley

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.

Perhaps you should put your head down._ I knew this was the thing to do, although I__e never fainted and I don__ intend to.

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

Thoughts are strange creatures. They lead you from one thing to another. Sometimes you don__ know how you got from one to the next.

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.

But witchy magic doesn__ listen to please and pretty please, and anyway, I didn__ 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 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__ how mothers come to fling runaway motorcars from their children.

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.

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.

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.

It__ one thing if a person learns you__e a witch. It__ quite another if he learns you__e a murderer. I almost forget I__ a witch now that I know I__ a murderer__urderess, actually. Murderess sounds so much worse.

Witches don__ look like anything. Witches are. Witches do.

Even a witch wants sympathy.

There are no preconditions for jealousy. You don't have to be right, you don't have to be reasonable.

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.

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.