You Like It Darker

The world is full of rattlesnakes. Sometimes you step on them and they don’t bite. Sometimes you step over them and they bite anyway.

Grief sleeps but doesn’t die. At least not until the griever does.

Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic. A paradox, but a true one. I believe it is the unimaginative among us, those incapable of appreciating the dark side of make-believe, who have been responsible for most of the world’s woes. In stories of the supernatural and paranormal, I have tried especially hard to show the real world as it is, and to tell the truth about the America I know and love.

Imagination is hungry, and needs to be fed.

that lack of belief is the curse of intelligence.

It’s all right to want what you can’t have. You learn to live with it. I tell myself that, and mostly I believe it.

He thought a person’s skin was thinner in the small hours. It didn’t start to thicken again until five, when the first light began to show in the east.

I should have come to see him these last years, but I was busy with my own affairs. I thought to myself, there’s time. We always think that, I guess. Then time runs out.

Well, I tell myself, we call it a gift and we call ourselves gifted, but gifts are never really earned, are they? Only given. Talent is grace made visible.

They were proof that life was basically a short dream on a summer afternoon.

We thought we were old but we didn’t know what old was.

There’s a line from Scorsese’s Mean Streets that’s always resonated with me: “You don’t fuck around with the infinite.

Some couples find a tougher love that endures after the romance thins away. Some couples discover that tougher love just isn’t in their repertoire. Instead of discussing money, they argue about it. Suspicion replaces trust. Secrets blossom in the shadows.

Marriage is honesty; it’s also a repository of shared secrets.

Nothing can give you what isn’t already there. This is axiomatic.

People have problems enough coping with their own tragedies without taking on the tragedies of others.

Gravity is greedy for the dead and wants them in the ground.

He laughed, then looked surprised… as if he hadn’t known he could laugh. “Nothing can give you what isn’t already there. This is axiomatic.

There were scars, but not disfiguring ones, and what were scars, after all, but wounds that had healed?

It occurs to Ella that lack of belief is the curse of intelligence.

I’m sorry for you. Your world is a living breath in a universe that is mostly filled with deadlights.

Duma was the Key that was supposed to have been haunted—so Mr. Ito had told me

Blindness to possibility is either a blessing or a curse. You choose.

Time always has a tale to tell, wouldn’t you say? Time and love.

I remember thinking that the fading of hopes and ambitions was mostly painless. That was good, but it was also rather horrible.

Later it will occur to him that you instinctively recognize a nemesis when one appears in your life.