The Throat Quotes

“It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“I liked the place I came from.
But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.
”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call "colorful." After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. 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.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smell and feelings, and they don’t have any of those things.
They stare at us, they don’t miss anything. They really see what’s going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We’re too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what’s happening.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“people who thought he was God yesterday morning, did a 360-degree turn twelve hours later.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“I liked the place I came from, but a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“But you write what comes back to you, and then afterward it comes back to you all over again.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat

“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.”
― Peter Straub, The Throat