Quotes from Peter Straub

The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he's a phony.

Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything.

In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.

I had this dream in which I was having a cocktail party, and it was in a big room. I was standing at the door saying hello to people, and Jeffrey Dahmer walks up and I say, 'Oh Jeffrey, please go on in, it's right in there.' And then I say to myself, I just put Jeffrey Dahmer in a room with all my friends.

Everything here is a lie, Rose said. Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened. Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand.

Holy shit! That's a vampire. He's writing a vampire novel. And I thought, this is the most tired cliche that anybody could dredge up out of the genre, and he just made it jump.

and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse.

And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life.

whatever his circumstances and surroundings, it was only a dead imagination that could call him a failure.

Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.

Why did you want to see me?" Dr. Lauterbach asked. "I'm unhappy," she had blurted out. "Everybody is unhappy," Dr. Lauterbach said

But you do not reject the supernatural out of hand,' Sears said. 'I don't know if I do or do not,' I said. 'Like most people.

Why did God make lonely people? Answer: He was lonely, too.

It seemed that if you listened to that snow hissing long enough, you wouldn't just hear it telling you that it was waiting for you, you'd hear some terrible secret—a secret to turn your life black.

Another writer once asked me why I wrote about "nebbishes." I told him I wanted to write about "the common man.") Sometimes I even

Being with his father was like watching somebody drown.

In a Sufi fable, the elephant fell in love with a firefly, and imagined that it shone for no other creature but he; and when it flew long distances away, he was confident that at the center of its light was the image of an elephant.

Home. But this isn't home. May it become so.

You're a scholar, and this here is your school. Your lessons are hard—hard—but you gotta learn 'em. Most people don't learn what you bein' taught until they a lot older. Nothing is safe, that's what you been learnin'.

For a moment he felt almost as though he were back in his old life, not 'Lamar Burgess' but Don Wanderley, one-time resident of Bolinas, California, and author of two novels (one of which had made some money). Lover for a time of Alma Mobley, brother to defunct David Wanderley.

Narcissus, gazing at his image in the pool, wept. A friend passing by saw him and asked, "Narcissus, why do you weep?" "Because my face has changed," Narcissus said. "Do you cry because you grow older?" "No. I see that I am no longer innocent. I have been gazing at myself long and long, and so doing have worn out my innocence.

what was happening to the town seemed to some like an almost biblical set of afflictions.

Evil is a convenient fiction.

Night came down around them, and the windows gave them back their faces, blurred into generalities.