Magic--that's just a label, you know. Completely meaningless. It wasn't so very long ago that people were saying that electricity was magic.

Then she did see it there - just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn’t a mask, it couldn’t be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn’t a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman. Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher’s knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. And her head.

A foolish man tells a woman to stop talking, but a wise man tells her that her mouth is extremely beautiful when her lips are closed.

Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.

Everything in this business makes sense, because it serves a real purpose, fills a need that's a part of living. Even a single nail, like this one, fulfills a function. Drive it into a crucial place and you can depend on it to do a job, keep on doing it for a hundred years to come. Long after we're dead and gone, both of us.

I always carry a pistol when I go [to the New York Public Library]. Never did trust those stone lions.

So much for modern science and its wonderful discoveries that just about everything can kill you. Life is only a bedtime story before a long, long sleep.