Peter Straub Quote

But this story ends when you open the door. It doesn’t matter if you managed to guess which room is mine, which door I closed behind me. You put your hand on the door handle, you knock, it’s all over. End of story. By choosing one, you chose the other, too. Do you understand why? Those two consequences are joined at the hip, they’re Siamese twins. Even if you picked the door with the lady behind it—all questions answered, all explanations given, your life solved for you—it’s still true that you gave the tiger permission to jump. You gave your assent to catastrophe, you invited tragedy and horror to walk right in. You got lucky, that’s all. Mallon

Peter Straub

But this story ends when you open the door. It doesn’t matter if you managed to guess which room is mine, which door I closed behind me. You put your hand on the door handle, you knock, it’s all over. End of story. By choosing one, you chose the other, too. Do you understand why? Those two consequences are joined at the hip, they’re Siamese twins. Even if you picked the door with the lady behind it—all questions answered, all explanations given, your life solved for you—it’s still true that you gave the tiger permission to jump. You gave your assent to catastrophe, you invited tragedy and horror to walk right in. You got lucky, that’s all. Mallon

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About Peter Straub

Peter Francis Straub (; March 2, 1943 – September 4, 2022) was an American novelist and poet. He had success with several horror and supernatural fiction novels, among them Julia (1975), Ghost Story (1979) and The Talisman (1984), the latter co-written with Stephen King. He explored the mystery genre with the Blue Rose trilogy, consisting of Koko (1988), Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993). He fused the supernatural with crime fiction in Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003) and the related In the Night Room (2004). For the Library of America, he edited the volume H. P. Lovecraft: Tales and the anthology American Fantastic Tales. Straub received such literary honors as the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, and International Horror Guild Award.
According to his New York Times obituary, Straub "brought a poet's sensibility to stories about ghosts, demons and other things that go bump in the night."