Quotes from Peter Straub

I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.

Wolf! Right here and now!

The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.

Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things - I'm telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe.

Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.

What was the worst thing you've ever done? I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me...the most dreadful thing...

He was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant.

You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.

In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

She thought, instead, with longing of more books—of buying books—of slipping into a narrative of other people's lives. That was release.

nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.

I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative.

What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered.

To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe. A piece of the universe? A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.

Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up.

The mind was a trap--it was a cage that slammed down over you.

Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.

The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.

It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.

David," I said, "no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.

The face was no longer bone, but animal - the face of a white wolf. "I forbid you nothing. Nothing, " uttered the awful face. "You may go anywhere - you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find." The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth.

Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smell and feelings, and they don't have any of those things. They stare at us, they don't miss anything. They really see what's going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We're too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what's happening.

When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call "colorful." After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it's just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be.