Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I delight in what I fear.
God! Whose hand was I holding?
Oh Constance, we are so happy.
A pretty sight, a lady with a book.
Wear your boots if you wander today
Bridge is a game for the undivided intellect.
In the country of the story the writer is king.
Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.
Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?
I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.
For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.
Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.
So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.
in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.
It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.
I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.
I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
The number of people who expected Mrs. Hutchinson to win a Bendix washer would amaze you.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...
I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.
On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.
I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.' 'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.
We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.
We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.
February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.
It is only with the eyes open that a corporeal form returns, and assembles itself firmly around the hard core of sight.
Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.
There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.
I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.
I assume then, that you have no real faith in the fondness any of the rest of us may feel for you?''None,' said Mrs. Halloran.
All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.
The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.
I never was a person who wanted a handout. I was a cafeteria worker. I'm not too proud to ask the Best Western manager to give me a job. I have cleaned homes.
He is altogether selfish, she thought in some surprise, the only man I have ever sat and talked to alone, and I am impatient; he is simply not very interesting.
I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.
I have always loved to use fear, to take it and comprehend it and make it work and consolidate a situation where I was afraid and take it whole and work from there.
You will be wondering about that sugar bowl, I imagine, is it still in use? You are wondering, has it been cleaned? You may very well ask, was it thoroughly washed?
Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.
The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books.
Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.
Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.
I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts.
No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.
It has long been my belief that in times of great stress, such as a 4-day vacation, the thin veneer of family wears off almost at once, and we are revealed in our true personalities.
Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children.
Gossip says she hanged herself from the turret on the tower, but when you have a house like Hill House with a tower and a turret, gossip would hardly allow you to hang yourself anywhere else.