We all have a tendency to want order in our lives. But order presupposes authority, and authority presupposes, sooner or later, that we'll all need hooves. It's going to happen sooner or later, isn't it? You know it is.

A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.

I don't really get philosophical, but I believe that nice people are strong and usually in my horror stories, I don't like to write about the old standard where some rotten guy gets chased by a mean spirit that gets him in the end.I'd rather write about nice people that are menaced from outside by some sort of evil power and who sort of slug it out.

Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.

I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.