No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
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.
Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.
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...
I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.
February, when the days of winter seem endless and no amount of wistful recollecting can bring back any air of summer.
I delight in what I fear.
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.
I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.
I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do.
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.
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.
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.
I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.
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.
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.
Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.