Top 100 Straub's Quotes
#1. As Lily Cavenaugh says in The Talisman (and it was Peter Straub's line, not mine), "You can never be too thin or too rich." And if you don't believe it, you were never really fat or really poor.
Stephen King
#2. I generally wade in blind and trust to fate and instinct to see me through.
Peter Straub
#3. I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl.
Nnedi Okorafor
#4. He was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant.
Peter Straub
#5. She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate.
Peter Straub
#6. I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.
Peter Straub
#7. Friendships were tricky things, especially friendships as old as theirs was. Nudity was nothing more than a collection of hard-earned scars and marks. Love was a given, uncomplicated by sex or vows, but honesty was always waiting there, ready to capsize the steady boat.
Emma Straub
#8. The materials of genre - specifically the paired genres of horror and the fantastic - in no way require the constrictions of formulaic treatment, and in fact naturally extend and evolve into the methods and concerns of its wider context, general literature.
Peter Straub
#9. to be a hypocrite or a liar? Jim wasn't
Emma Straub
#10. I'm being haunted," she blurted out.
"My dear," he cooed. "Turn yourself into a tourist attraction and charge admission.
Peter Straub
#12. Why couldn't everyone stay young forever? If not on the outside, then just on the inside, where no one ever got too old to be optimistic.
Emma Straub
#13. Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up.
Peter Straub
#14. A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else,
Peter Straub
#15. Taylor Swift had probably slept with more people than she had, and good for her.
Emma Straub
#16. Choices were easy to make until you realized how long life could be.
Emma Straub
#17. There wasn't enough time in the world, not for the things that mattered most.
Emma Straub
#18. And then a prince will come along and say the magic words and three ravens will give you the magic tokens and a fish will carry you on his back
Peter Straub
#19. Going to one school from age five to age eighteen was like being buried in amber. It wasn't even like his walls, which were covered with layers of things - you had to be the same person from start to finish, with no big cognitive jumps.
Emma Straub
#20. Once Charles arrived, Franny would start laughing the way she had when she was twenty-four, and the rest of them could start setting one another on fire for all she cared. That's what best friends did: ruin people for everyone else.
Emma Straub
#21. The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.
Peter Straub
#22. They were just wading through the muck like everyone else.
Emma Straub
#23. It was officially the most horrible time of the summer, when everyone was starting to come back, unpack, do laundry, repack, and go to school, all while noisily updating social media with pictures of everybody hugging each other and their stupid siblings and their stupid dogs.
Emma Straub
#24. and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse.
Peter Straub
#25. It's a rental, I said, realizing when I said it that our house was the only rental on the block. Maybe something unseemly had happened there: adultery, Judaism, modern dance.
Emma Straub
#26. Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent.
Peter Straub
#27. My first real breakthrough collided with the last months of Callaghan's Labour government, which had every intention of enjoying my success as much as I did.
Peter Straub
#28. Holy shit! That's a vampire. He's writing a vampire novel. And I thought, this is the most tired cliche that anybody could dredge up out of the genre, and he just made it jump.
Peter Straub
#29. The wizard stirs, opens his eyes, and looks at the reluctant boy. "Oh, you'll get your heart broken," he says. "Is that what you're waiting to hear? It'll be broken, all right. But you'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. That's the way of it, boy.
Peter Straub
#30. She thought, instead, with longing of more books - of buying books - of slipping into a narrative of other people's lives. That was release.
Peter Straub
#31. It's about you. I always thought that you would need some time, you know, to grow up, but I think I just realized that it's never going to happen, not while I'm sitting around waiting for it.
Emma Straub
#32. The Internet was excellent for confirming one's worst fears about the human race.
Emma Straub
#33. I mean, it's never too late to decide to do something else. Becoming an adult doesn't mean that you suddenly have all the answers.
Emma Straub
#34. It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.
Peter Straub
#35. Jim's vague understanding was that she had so much money that a strict job description was superfluous.
Emma Straub
#36. 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
#37. Kids are forever, even if love isn't, right?
Emma Straub
#38. There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.
Peter Straub
#39. 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
#40. the major accomplishment of her life was producing two children who seemed to like each other even when no one else was looking,
Emma Straub
#41. No on thought that they would be anything more or less than perfectly fine.
Emma Straub
#42. Me tienen hasta los huevos. It means I've had it up to my balls.
Emma Straub
#43. It was so long ago now that the job felt like part of her soul. Like being a teacher or an artist who made things out of sand. You never really saw the results. You just trusted that you knew what you were doing and that everything would work out okay in the end.
Emma Straub
#44. force them to band together. Jim imagined himself and Franny striding into a Mallorcan courtroom, the bump on Franny's head now the size of a tennis ball, hard proof of Antoni's negligence. "And how are you?" Charles asked. He purposefully
Emma Straub
#45. I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.
Peter Straub
#46. A good swimming pool could do that - make the rest of the world seem impossibly insignificant, as far away as the surface of the moon.
Emma Straub
#47. The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.
Peter Straub
#48. I liked the place I came from.
But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.
Peter Straub
#49. Everything here is a lie," Rose said. "Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened." Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand.
Peter Straub
#51. Students set up desks where you could sign petitions for legalizing marijuana or declare yourself in favor of homosexuality and the protection of whales; students thronged by.
Peter Straub
#52. ... She might have thought that it was the case, that all things worked out in the end, and that the world was a benevolent place, but she knew better now, and had to fake it.
Emma Straub
#53. Things that happen in seven years: Brad Pitt in Tibet. The itch.
Emma Straub
#54. Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything.
Peter Straub
#55. It seemed like folly to imagine that one could fill a house (or a tent) with relatives and still expect to have a pleasant vacation.
Emma Straub
#58. Andi Teran's first novel is vivid and fully realized, an entire universe expertly condensed into the pages you hold in your hands. Ana herself is a complicated delight, and by the end of the book I wanted to scoop her up into my arms.
Emma Straub
#59. A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off.
Peter Straub
#60. On gym days, I don't get to my desk until 4 in the afternoon, and everything except bedtime and the appointment with the liquid narcotic is pushed back a bit.
Peter Straub
#61. But you do not reject the supernatural out of hand,' Sears said. 'I don't know if I do or do not,' I said. 'Like most people.
Peter Straub
#62. I know this doesn't make sense, but if we ever did this before, exactly this, with you sitting over there and me here, in this same room, well, wasn't the food even better? I mean, a lot better?
Peter Straub
#63. I had a connoisseur's ... appreciation of fear.
Peter Straub
#64. Why bother getting married, going through all the pomp and pageantry, if you didn't think it was going to last? It was far easier to live in sin and not have to deal with the paperwork.
Emma Straub
#65. Privilege encased them, surrounded them like armor. In the cast of their faces was the assumption that they would never have to take anything very seriously. For the first time in my life I saw the truth in the old proposition that the rich were better-looking.
Peter Straub
#66. My mom didn't write, but she loved to read. She liked books 'that made you a little nervous.' Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub were the three wise men of our family bookshelf.
Michael Easton
#67. It glowed in the mid-morning sunlight, the black shutters on the open windows eyelashes on a beautiful face.
Emma Straub
#68. I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old.
Peter Straub
#69. Families were nothing more than hope cast out in a wide net, everyone wanting only the best.
Emma Straub
#70. Parenthood is the only job that gets progressively harder every single year, and you never, ever, ever get a raise.
Emma Straub
#71. Fear and I were old buddies, despite my best efforts to the contrary.
Peter Straub
#72. A good boy almost all of the time, as well behaved as a loyal hound
Emma Straub
#73. What we do here is physiologically impossible. So we must train the body to accept the impossible, and then it will become possible.
Peter Straub
#74. the night before, but now, moments before their scheduled departure, he was wavering. Had he packed enough books? He walked back and forth in front
Emma Straub
#75. She had the wild look of someone who hadn't slept in twenty-four hours, with purplish semicircles underneath both her eyes. Being eighteen was like being made out of rubber and cocaine.
Emma Straub
#76. Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.
Peter Straub
#77. The mind was a trap
it was a cage that slammed down over you.
Peter Straub
#78. Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.
Peter Straub
#79. If I'd had a friend next to me, I would have squeezed her arm and said, Can you believe this? - but kitsch wasn't kitsch if you were alone.
Emma Straub
#80. There was nothing in life harder or more important than agreeing every morning to stay the course, to go back to your forgotten self of so many years ago, and to make the same decision. Marriages, like ships, needed steering, and steady hands at the wheel.
Emma Straub
#81. When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before.
Peter Straub
#82. Teenagers and younger children did not need to sit in business class, let alone first - that was Franny's philosophy. The extra room was for people who could appreciate it, truly appreciate it, and she did.
Emma Straub
#83. If I planned everything out in advance, I'd expire of boredom.
Peter Straub
#84. It was incomprehensible to Ricky that anyone could find Milburn boring: if you watched it closely for seventy years, you saw the century at work.
Peter Straub
#85. Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.
Peter Straub
#86. As soon as I started writing Julia, by which I mean while writing its first sentence, I felt a sudden, reassuring charge of excitement. I knew it was going to work.
Peter Straub
#87. ... She was as beautiful and lost as a landlocked mermaid.
Emma Straub
#88. (Another writer once asked me why I wrote about "nebbishes." I told him I wanted to write about "the common man.") Sometimes I even
Peter Straub
#89. To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe.
A piece of the universe?
A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.
Peter Straub
#90. There have been times when I reread - or at least leafed through - something because I'd sent a copy to a friend, and what usually happened was that I noticed dozens and dozens of clumsy phrases I wished I could rewrite.
Peter Straub
#91. Franny liked this moment most of all: being alone in the kitchen after almost everything was finished, and listening to the assembled guests chatting happily, knowing they were soon to be fed.
Emma Straub
#92. Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.
Peter Straub
#93. Dogs were gloriously uncomplicated creatures - food and play and sleep and love, that was all they needed.
Emma Straub
#94. Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better.
Peter Straub
#95. Kindness refreshes and restores the tired and broken.
Gerard Straub
#96. David," I said, "no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.
Peter Straub
#97. All she wanted was a button she could push to pause her age, just for a little while, a few years, while she got used to the idea.
Emma Straub
#98. They were with their mother, and so they were acting like children.
Emma Straub
#99. I've been a fan of vampire fiction since way, way back - I loved Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Robert McCammon, Shirley Jackson, lots of great horror and paranormal fiction.
Rachel Caine
#100. Promised little waves and nice breezes, and she could practice her Spanish, which she had done well in during high school. Everyone - literally everyone - from her graduating class was
Emma Straub
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