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.
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.
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.
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.
When shall we live if not now?
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.
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.
I wonder if I could eat a child if I had the chance.' 'I doubt if I could cook one,' said Constance.
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.
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.
