I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. Just as I believe that a painter cannot sit down to his morning coffee without noticing what color it is, so a writer cannot see an odd little gesture without putting a verbal description to it, and ought never to let a moment go by undescribed.

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 was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes--the left--saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night. If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented.

For plain and fancy worrying, give me a new mother every time.

in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.

Hill House, she thought, You're as hard to get into as heaven.

It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. On the other hand, abstract belief is largely impossible; it is the concrete, the actuality of the cup, the candle, the sacrificial stone, which hardens belief; the statue is nothing until it cries, the philosophy is nothing until the philosopher is martyred.