Ghost Story Quotes

“... He was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“...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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“The mind was a trap--it was a cage that slammed down over you.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“it didn’t have a real ending. It just slipped backward when other things happened.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“the”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“She’s the general. But history is full of dead generals.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“They’ve probably been around for centuries—for longer than that. They’ve certainly been talked about and written about for hundreds of years. I think they are what people used to call vampires and werewolves—they’re probably behind a thousand ghost stories. Well, in the stories, and I think that means in the past, people found ways to make them die again. Stakes through the heart or silver bullets—remember? The point is that they can be destroyed.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“Well, I think he has an informal trade in pharmaceuticals,”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“How do you define man, anyhow?” “Sexual and imperfect,”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“What he did not articulate but was half aware of was the notion that he feared to peer too closely into the last moments of any suicide’s life, be it friend or wife.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“Funny how lost this country seems, though people have been walking back and forth over it for hundreds of years. It looks bruised and regretful, its soul gone or withdrawn, waiting for something to happen that will wake it up again.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“She thinks that talking about it would help.” “That sounds like a woman. Talking just opens the wounds. Not talking helps to heal them.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“Every word that Fenny spoke opened a new abyss.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“You know, sidewalks made a greater contribution to civilization than the piston engine. Spring and winter in the old days you had to wade through mud, and you couldn’t enter a drawing room without tracking some of it in. Summers, the dust was everywhere!”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“It is always true in personal, if not historical, terms that a golden age's defining characteristic is its dailiness, its offered succession of the small satisfactions of daily living.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, 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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“When every possibility is taken away then we have sinned." The idea seemed to radiate throughout Hawtorne's work, and I could connect the novels and stories by this black Cristianity, by the impulse in them for nightmare - by what was almost their desire for nightmare. For to imagine a nightmare is to put it at one remove. And I found a statement by Hawtorne which helped to explain his method: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mindwas 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.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story

“My uncle's town, Milburn, is one of those places that seems to create its own limbo and then to nest down in it.”
― Peter Straub, Ghost Story