Let him be wise, or let me be blind; don't let me, she hoped concretely, don't let me know too surely what he thinks of me.

We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.

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.

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.

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.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

I delight in what I fear.