The Folk Keeper Quotes

“It is true that I can trip over anything and nothing – a speck of dust, a patch of sunlight, an idea. I move through life like a person with one eye, through a landscape that looks flat, but is really tricked out with hidden depths and shallows. It didn’t use to be so, but no matter. I navigate the world well enough in my own way.”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper

“I like rain and mist. I've never understood why people exclaim over bright skies and bushels of glaring sunshine.”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper

“Imagine a world without shadows. You cannot touch a shadow, but a world without them is a hard world, and flat.”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper

“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, The Folk Keeper

“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, The Folk Keeper

“...if you don't argue, you can't give in...”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper

“It never ends, this business of being a lady.”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper

“The sea up close is enormous. I squeezed my eyes against it for a moment, which is ridiculous, like fighting a giant with a pin. It comes to you anyway, through your ears and nose and skin and tongue. It is a savage, muscular thing, a vast dim wetness battering at the land and the air and all your senses.”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper

“I knew then the taste of true fear. It tastes of dark places deep in your stomach and holds you by the neck.”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper

“For four years I have been wearing blinders. I thought all this time I walked a path of cobblestones, and it turns out to have been an avenue of stars! For four years, my head has been caught in a box. Its sides were painted with pleasant enough scenes, but that I should have thought this was the world!”
― Franny Billingsley, The Folk Keeper