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Peter Straub QUOTES

Peter Straub QUOTES

1 " From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, amazement, shock, terror, anger, anxiety, melancholia, or the momentary frisson of horror. "

― Peter Straub , American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

2 " Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality. "

― Peter Straub , American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

3 " What would be frightening about me jumping out of the bush wearing a pig mask is not the sudden surprise, not me, and not the pig mask, but that the ordinary world had split open for a moment to reveal some possibility never previously considered. "

― Peter Straub

4 " Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night. "

― Peter Straub , Mystery (Blue Rose Trilogy #2)

5 " The path to wisdom leads downward, and anyone who decides to take it had better buckle on armor, remember to bring a sword, and get used to the idea that when and if he gets back everyone he talks to is going to think he's a phony. "

― Peter Straub

6 " To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad. "

― Peter Straub , American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

7 " Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking. "

― Peter Straub , If You Could See Me Now

8 " Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. "

― Peter Straub

9 " ...nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side. "

― Peter Straub , Ghost Story

10 " He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby...He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving. "

― Peter Straub , Mrs. God

11 " I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that. "

― Peter Straub

12 " I have been sometimes way too attracted by my own villains because in a way they seem to hold the secret to the heart of the narrative. "

― Peter Straub

13 " This was a respect in which he paid due homage to the wise old spirit of the late Emiel Kroger, that romantically practical Teuton who used to murmur to Pablo, between sleeping and waking, a sort of incantation that went like his: Sometimes you will find it and other times you won't find it and the times you don't find it are the times when you have got to be careful. Those are the times when you have got to remember that other times you will find it, not this time but the next time, or the time after that, and then you've got to be able to go home without it, yes, those times are the times when you have got to be able to go home without it, go home alone without it... "

― Peter Straub , American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

14 " It snowed all week. Wheels and footsteps moved soundlessly on the street, as if the business of living continued secretly behind a pale but impenetrable curtain. In the falling quiet there was no sky or earth, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city. At all hours it was necessary to keep a lamp lighted, and Mrs. Miller lost track of the days: Friday was no different from Saturday and on Sunday she went to the grocery: closed, of course. "

― Peter Straub , American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

15 " The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, spring nor fall. A thermal haze of inexpressible sweetness, though bearing tiny bits of grit or mica, had eased into the Valley from the industrial region to the north and there were nights when the sun set at the western horizon as if it were sinking through a porous red mass, and there were days when a hard-glaring moon like bone remained fixed in a single position, prominent in the sky. ("Family") "

― Peter Straub , American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

16 " The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part jewel, part mud. In the midst of my usual afternoon stroll through the small hilly town attached to the girls' college where I taught French literature, I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not. ("The Vane Sisters") "

― Peter Straub , American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940's Until Now

17 " When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call "colorful." After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it's just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be. "

― Peter Straub , The Throat

18 " It’s a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it. "

― Peter Straub , A Dark Matter

19 " She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride. "

― Peter Straub , The Hellfire Club

20 " You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces "

― Peter Straub , Ghost Story