89 Quotes by Kelly Barnhill

Sister Witch didn’t truck with hoping. Hoping was irrational, impractical, and imprecise. Sister Witch was a solver.

The stars cut into the inky black sky, like glinting shards of glass.

Failure was not an indication of perpetual failure – no! Instead, it was another step along the creative process: we make; we discard. By discarding, I could make again. I could do what I needed to do: write the next book. Write the right book.

Fran was, she saw, surrounded by idiots. And she couldn’t slip away.

All stories are lies until someone believes in them.

But as the years passed, Ned’s silence grew and grew. It pressed upon his face and his body. It leaked into the house and spread outward into the yard. His silence had weight. It had substance and presence and teeth.

People died. And while it made their loved ones sad, it didn’t seem to bother the dead person one bit. They were dead, after all. They had moved on to other matters.

A word, after all, is a kind of magic. It locks the substance of a thing in sound or symbol, and affixes it to the ear, or paper, or stone. Words call the world into being. That’s power indeed.

Sometimes it felt to him that the world was heavy, that the air, thick with sorrow, draped over his mind and body and vision, like a fog.