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....

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.

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.

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...

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.

Witches don’t look like anything. Witches are. Witches do.

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?

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.

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...

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...

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.

Even a witch wants sympathy.

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...

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

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.

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.

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...

You can practice and practice, but the real experience will always be different. Lots of things are like that, actually.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

How can something as fragile as a word build the whole world?

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

Things taste better outdoors. And if it’s a forbidden thing, so much the better.