Quotes from book

Haunted

“People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party… As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do.”

“Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile.”

“People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”

“How can you possibly believe he really loves you?” Miss Sneezy looks from the Mother to the Saint to Mr. Whittier’s hand.“You have no choice,” Mr. Whittier tells her. “If you need to be loved.”

“We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them.”

“In a city this size, every year, hundreds of husbands walk away. Kids leave home. Wives escape. People disappear.”

“In light this bright, after so long in the dark, everything we can see is only black and white. Only glaring
shape-outlines we have to blink against.”

“The air will always be to filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.”

“That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed.”

“We’d turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we’d survive to talk about.”

“Some stories, you use up. Others use you up.”

“Anything pretty,' Claire will tell you, 'it's only for sale because no one wants it.”

“The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.”

“Our purest form of joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy.”

“A book is as private and consensual as sex.”

“That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell.”

“If there's a trick to doing a job you hate… Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more.”

“If we can forgive what's been done to us… If we can forgive what we've done to others… If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world.”

“Going to work just looked crazy. Eating another meal, ever, made about as much sense as planting tulip bulbs in the shadow of a falling atom bomb.”