Chance wanting to defend her grandfather, but not about to leave the library, dustysafe sanctuary of shelves and glass cases and the musty smell of all the books, the door locked from the inside again...
You love someone. You don’t leave her to drown. And you don’t tell her she’s crazier than she already knows that she is!
Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mis...
[L]uxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits witho...
Stop it," Chance says out loud, angryraw, scornful voice that she hardly recognizes, "Jesus, just fucking stop it," but she's crying again, and her eyes burn, and she's so goddamn sick of the sound, t...
I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.
It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about ou...
There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades be...
Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Jua...
I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.
Time is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever passed away, not entirely.
I began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and...
A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.
I don't judge a scene or a line of dialog by whether or not it advances the plot, for example. Imagine an edit of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction wherein only dialog that advances the plot was allowed to rem...
That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.
You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.
Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as...
Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.
After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used t...
I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a ser...
