“Mostly I was just plain freaked. Not mentally tottering, I think a human mind that's moderately well-adjusted can absorb a lot of strangeness before it actually totters, but freaked, yes.”

“Even the most well-adjusted person is holding on to his or her sanity by a greased rope. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”

“Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only a species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not . . . not the way his face said he felt.”

“I think that's what people most always do with the stuff they can't make out - just forget it.”

“And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.”

“Here is something I learned in 1922: there are always worse things waiting. You think you have seen the most terrible thing, the one that coalesces all your nightmares into a freakish horror that actually exists, and the only consolation is that there can be nothing worse. Even if there is, your mind will snap at the sight of it, and you will know no more. But there is worse, your mind does not snap, and somehow you carry on. You might understand that all the joy has gone...”

“That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.”