Quotes from Peter Straub

What's a good lawyer besides a superior bullshitter?...

You're dying to hear what she said. And you will. The three principles are: "One. If something is free to be taken, take it. "Two. Other people exist so that you may use them. "Three. Nothing on earth means anything, or can mean anything, but what it is.

He remembered the faces of his friends, bereft poor corpses, abandoned of life.

the vocabulary of love was so tired.

people who thought he was God yesterday morning, did a 360-degree turn twelve hours later.

I don't shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.

We were so raw that we could be seduced by civility.

In the next book, A Walk Among the Tombstones, which winds toward an unblinking description of torture and dismemberment, Elaine answers Scudder's admission that he has long been troubled by her visits from other men, and his straightforward confession of love, with the revelation that she has not entertained another man for months, has in fact quit her profession, and of course loves him, too.

As for what I'm doing now," he said, "I guess I'm trying to bring the past to life.

When evil had taken root in this house, it had grown here first.

I don't know how her life turned out, but I do know that 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.

It was the unhappy perception at the center of every ghost story.

Yes, he admitted to himself for the thousandth time, he did like it here. It went against his principles and his politics and probably the puritanism of his long-vanished religion too, but Sears's library – Sears's whole splendid house – was a place where a man felt at ease.

The group called the Chowder Society had only a few rules: they wore evening clothes (because thirty years ago, Sears had rather liked the idea), they never drank too much (and now they were too old for that anyhow), they never asked if any of the stories were true (since even the outright whoppers were in some sense true), and though the stories went around the group in rotation, they never pressured anyone who had temporarily dried up.

My uncle's town, Milburn, is one of those places that seems to create its own limbo and then to nest down in it.

You all know what's been happening to us. We sit around here and talk like a bunch of ghouls. Milly can hardly stand having us in my house anymore. We weren't always like this – we used to talk about all sorts of things. We used to have fun – there used to be fun. Now there isn't. We're all scared. But I don't know if some of you are admitting it. Well, it's been a year, and I don't mind saying that I am.

Despite all this talk about imagination, we are implacably real.

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.

But you write what comes back to you, and then afterward it comes back to you all over again.

To negate the pain, men and gods forget, pretend to forget, then forget to pretend.

Inexplicable music that should have sounded joyful but was instead wound full of the darkness emotions you know.

I liked the place I came from, but a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.

Students set up desks where you could sign petitions for legalizing marijuana or declare yourself in favor of homosexuality and the protection of whales; students thronged by.

Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology.