Someone has to ask you a question," George continues meaningly, "before you can answer it. But it's so seldom you find anyone who'll ask the right questions. Most people aren't that much interested.

I'm like a book you have to read. A book can't read itself to you. It doesn't even know what it's about. I don't know what I'm about.

But your book is wrong, Mrs. Strunk, says George, when it tells you that Jim is the substitute I found for a real son, a real kid brother, a real husband, a real wife. Jim wasn't a substitute for anything. And there is no substitute for Jim, if you'll forgive my saying so, anywhere.

Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.

What it sees there isn't so much a face as the expression of a predicament.

George smiles to himself, with entire self-satisfaction. Yes, I am crazy, he thinks. That is my secret; my strength.

Staring and staring into the mirror, it sees many faces within its face - the face of the child, the boy, the young man, the not-so-young man - all present still, preserved like fossils on superimposed layers, and, like fossils, dead. Their message to this live dying creature is: Look at us - we have died - what is there to be afraid of? It answers them: But that happened so gradually, so easily. I'm afraid of being rushed.