“I tell you, my idea of a ghost is something quite different. Dead men rise up never – read even your poets. Ghosts breed in the living.”

“There's a queer streak in human natures. Men come back to places for secret reasons, for feelings they cannot resist.'More than men come back,” I said.”

“Automatically, like all healthy, normal beings, I deny the existence of horror...”

“There is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or the theological outline, but the story, the poem, and the vision--all of them literary forms and products of the imagination (though not necessarily the fictional imagination). Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts.”

“Whose are all these ghosts?” she said, smiling at a flustered-looking Geraldine. “Oh,” said Geraldine, “I think they might be mine...?”

“Malachi make sure you know the desire of your heart is the right desire.”

“It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.”