The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.

I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.

The idea of a series of items, following one another docilely, forms the only possible reasonable approach to life if you have to live it with a home and a husband and children, none of whom would dream of following one another docilely.

Fear," the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

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

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.

The sight of one's own heart is degrading; people are not meant to look inward - that's why they've been given bodies, to hide their souls.