A Cosmology of Monsters

...he has so much he wants to tell the boy, but most important, maybe, is this: life makes monsters of everyone, but it's always possible to come back. Pain and death are real, but so are love, and family, and forgiveness.

Living with a family wounded by a loss you can't remember is like sitting behind a tall person at a movie theater. The people around you are laughing, crying, reacting to something, but you have no idea what.

I don't reject the choices I've made, or the cost. It's not so surprising, I guess. My monster suit always fit better than my regular skin. I was never a guardian, or a hero, but a creator and harvester of fear.

...there's no such thing as a happy ending. The songs, books, and movies with "happy endings" al stop at teh moment of triumph....There are, however, good stopping places.

Human beings are small and insignificant in a big, scary universe, and in a horror story - be it a movie, a book, or a haunted house - we have to face that fact. But no matter how scary things get, no matter what the audience has to confront or to endure, there's always a happy ending. When the credits roll, or the reader closes the book, or when our guests walk out tonight, their lives will go on. Because they faced the dark, the sun will shine a little brighter tomorrow, and the real-life monsters won't seem so bad. For a day, or an hour, or even a moment, life will be better

life makes monsters of everyone, but it’s always possible to come back. Pain and death are real, but so are love, and family, and forgiveness.

it’s hard to live with a depressed person. The depression takes up physical space, swells and seeps under closed doors. It wafts between rooms like poison gas, settling over the house in a fog.

We can't make new happiness past a certain point, but we can linger in past joy forever, perfectly captured with the rememberer's eye.

So." She drummed her fingers on the book. "You're a grown man who still reads ghost and monster stories." "You already knew that about me, he said." "I guess I didn't think about it until now," she said. "You don't feel sort of ridiculous? Like maybe you should be reading books for grown-ups?" "I think horror is the most important fiction in the world," he said.

Most people in your life are digging at you for things they want - sex, attention, a smile, permission, to change lanes on the highway. They're hunting for things to take, not give.

What would he look like in another ten years, or twenty, when the pressures of chicken entrepreneurship began to wear on him?

I'll have eternity with my greatest hits. That has to be what's inside the church. It has to be the answer. We can't make new happiness past a certain point, but we can linger in past joy forever, perfectly captured with the rememberer's eye.

Love is ridiculous, right? A chemical imbalance, an illness. We catch it, we go mad for a little while, and what do we do when it passes? if we're "lucky," we're saddled with an imperfect marriage, a mortgage, and obnoxious, needy, resentful kids. Our ambitions and dreams and potential greatness are extinguished for want of a little human contact and some orgasms (passing bodily contractions that can easily be achieved on one's own). And yet, 99% of all music, literature, film, and art is devoted to love. The world carries on like this is the best, most natural thing. We sing endless songs about getting sick, and the complex of scars left when the illness fades.

I love you until the end of time, and whatever comes after that.' It was a bit of a doggerel he'd coined on their wedding night, such a dramatic proclamation that Margaret had laughed in his face. It had since become shorthand between them, part of of the internal language of marriage, a phrase both ironic and sincere, something uttered with a roll of the eyes and a thump of the heart.

Eunice just wanted a different favor. She wanted to hear Merrin say the forbidden words, to make okay the rotten thing at Eunice’s core that makes her ashamed and afraid of herself.

Vivre au sein d’une famille marquée par un deuil dont on ne garde aucun souvenir est comme d’être assis derrière un spectateur de très grand taille au cinéma. Autour de soi, tout le monde rit, pleure et réagit à des choses dont on ignore tout.