I assume then, that you have no real faith in the fondness any of the rest of us may feel for you?''None,' said Mrs. Halloran.

All cat stories start with this statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this...

I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.

There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.

I was already doing a lot of splendid research reading all the books about ghosts I could get hold of, and particularly true ghost stories - so much so that it became necessary for me to read a chapter of _Little Women_ every night before I turned out the light - and at the same time I was collecting pictures of houses, particularly odd houses, to see what I could find to make into a suitable haunted house.

I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives.

[L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch . . .