“They lived in fearful perplexity and passed it off as imagination”

“The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear?"Yes."My Imagination."I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself."Then you have a small imagination."Roland and Eddie”

“Fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth.”

“She looked from her son to Bill and back to her son again, touched by wonder that was mostly simple perplexity but partly a fear so thin and sharp that it found its way deep into her inner heart and vibrated there like a tuning-fork made of clear ice.”

“So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.”

“She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fears = unknown.”

“And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.”