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Each time I told my story, I lost a bit, the smallest drop of pain. It was that day that I knew I wanted to tell the story of my family. Because horror on Earth is real and it is every day. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.

"Abigail," he said when he grew closer.
"Oh, Len," she said. Her face puzzled up on what she could say next. His name had been the sigh she needed. Everything that came next was not words.

"When the dead are done with the living," Franny said to me, "the living can go on to other things."
"What about the dead?" I asked. "Where do we go?"
She wouldn't answer me.

I wish a smile had come curling up onto my father's face, but he was deep under, swimming against drug and nightmare and waking dream. For a time leaden weights had been tied by anesthesia to the four corners of his consciousness. Like a firm waxen cover it had locked him away tight into the hard-blessed hours where there was no dead daughter and no gone knee, and where there was also nosweetdaughterwhisperingrhymes.

First he shut off the porch light they kept on all night for me and that, even though it had been eight months since the police said I would not be found alive, they could not bring themselves to stop leaving on.

“How to Commit the Perfect Murder” was an old game in heaven. I always chose the icicle: the weapon melts away.

"Obsession is the next step, in which a person is affected either internally or externally. And finally there is possession, by which the person temporarily loses control of his faculties and the devil acts in and through him."

"Then there are the so-called extraordinary activities of the devil in the world. Usually these are material things around a person that are affected: that might be what you're up against. We call it infestation."

"The traditional viewpoint of the Church sees the devil in a number of ways: He tries through temptation, by which he is seen to prod men toward sin in the psychological battles with which I'm sure you're familiar."

Hill House itself, not sane, stood against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, it's 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.

"Shall we make a new rule of life ... always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?"

"But the best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track, or even your grade point average - though those things are important, to be sure. It's what you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days, and whom you've touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success."

the whole Bird family/nest wordplay is really working for me

Asakawa was lost in thought, and didn't want to be bothered. He wished his wife would act like her name, which meant "quiet." The best way to seal a woman's mouth was not to reply.


HA HA

But Asakawa himself didn't much care if the company made money or lost it. All that mattered to him was whether or not the work was engaging. No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn't involve any imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.

"Here's to us," she said, holding the bottle high, the moonlight striking off the glass. "May we never grow old."

Coraline sighed. "You don't really understand, do you?" she said. "I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything. What then?"

"Because," she said, "when you're scared but you still do it anyway, that's brave."

"You're not living if you're not regretting."

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

"If your career is a bad boyfriend, it is healthy to remember you can always leave and go sleep with someone else".

I told a reporter here a while back - young girl, seemed nice enough. She was just tryin to be a reporter. She said: Sheriff how come you let crime get so out of hand in your country? Sounded like a fair question I reckon. Maybe it was a fair question. Anyway I told her, I said: It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.

You can say that things could have turned out differently. But what does that mean? That are not some other way. They are this way.

He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesn't allow for special cases.

I think the truth is always simple. It has pretty much got to be. It needs to be simple enough for a child to understand.

Things happen to you they happen. They dont ask first. They dont require your permission.

I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.

"Sometimes you have a little problem and you don't fix it and then all of a sudden it aint a little problem anymore. You understand what I'm tellin you?"