The writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.

Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha? She had shaken her head slowly. Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.

Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye.

All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.

Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.

They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.

When people begin to lose hope, there's bound to be explosions.