No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

A pretty sight, a lady with a book.

On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.

Am I walking toward something I should be running away from?

I delight in what I fear.

I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.

Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.

I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.

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.

Poor strangers, they have so much to be afraid of.

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.

When shall we live if not now?

On the moon we have everything. Lettuce, and pumpkin pie and Amanita phalloides. We have cat-furred plants and horses dancing with their wings. All the locks are solid and tight, and there are no ghosts.

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.

Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.' 'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.

God! Whose hand was I holding?

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.

Oh Constance, we are so happy.

Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

Why do people want to talk to each other? I mean, what are the things people always want to find out about other people?

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.

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.

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.

I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.

Don't do it, Eleanor told the little girl; insist on your cup of stars; once they have trapped you into being like everyone else you will never see your cup of stars again

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.

Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.

It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.

Wear your boots if you wander today

Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep? Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

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.

Can't you make them stop?' I asked her that day, wondering if there was anything in this woman I could speak to, if she had ever run joyfully over grass, or had watched flowers, or known delight or love.

When Jim Donell thought of something to say he said it as often and in as many ways as possible, perhaps because he had very few ideas and had to wring each one dry.

You never know what you are going to want until you see it clearly.

I looked at the clock with the faint unconscious hope common to all mothers that time will somehow have passed magically away and the next time you look it will be bedtime.

...you’d think my own face would know me...

Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We'll have new rules and new ways of living. Maybe there'll be a law not to live in houses, so then no one can hide from anyone else, you see.