“Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.”

“In the midst of chaos, a book is the best thing you can hold on to.”

“Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.”

“Once again the dead are walking in our midst- ironically, draped in the name of Marx, the man who tried to bury the dead of the nineteenth century.”

“This is a story about a family and, as there is a ghost involved, you might cal it a ghost story. But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at out tables long after they have gone.”

“Once you get it into your head that somebody is controlling events, you can interpret everything in that light and find no reasonable certainty anywhere.”

“In archaic and traditional societies, the surrounding world is conceived as a microcosm. At the limits of this closed world begins the domain of the unknown, of the formless. On this side there is ordered — because of inhabited and organized — space; on the other, outside this familiar space, there is the unknown and dangerous region of the demons, the ghosts, and the dead and foreigners — in a world, chaos or death or night. This image of an inhabited microcosm, surrounded by desert regions as a chaos or a kingdom of the dead, has survived even in highly evolved civilizations such as those of China, Mesopotamia and Egypt.”

“In Chaos Magic, beliefs are not seen as ends in themselves, but as tools for creating desired effects. To fully realize this is to face a terrible freedom in which nothing is true and everything is permitted, which is to say that everything is possible, there are no certainties, and the consequences can be ghastly.”

“I would have given it up--all of it up--to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder--a reminder of everything I am losting. The Life I will not have.”

“For this I would be damned forever. For this I would have given up everything.”