Devil House Quotes
"You’re descended from kings," she says, for the hundredth time in my life, or the five hundredth, or the five thousandth; and I smile, because it’s true, it’s all true.
"Everywhere," she says again. "You’ll see." She’s probably right.
"But if you write a book, maybe somebody makes a movie."
"It’s like being a florist. You ask a few questions about the occasion you’re being asked to mark, and then you hide your own signature somewhere in the arrangement."
"The past is charming and safe when you’re skittering around on its surface. It’s a nice place to linger a moment before seeking the lower depths."
"The stories I sought out weren’t exactly interchangeable, but they shared a space where the distribution of light and shadow was governed by similar latitudes."
"There’s unexplored terrain lurking in known shapes, unmapped quadrants waiting to be located by means of simple shifts in perspective."
"But few things, at any rate, are more powerful than expectations. Blunt force, maybe. Firepower, certainly. Sword and steel. But even those have their limits. The imagination has none."
"People bring expectations to the site of a massacre. It can’t be helped."
"Everybody’s complicated. I try to cleave to this precept."
"The future holds, for you, some unmooring like the one your fellow grown-ups seem so invested in at present."
"It’s the small favors we do for ourselves that we’ll remember when we’re older."
"There’s so much in life, a life so full of surprises if you only stayed open to them."
"No fate but the one chosen lightly; no destiny but the present moment."
"It’s a mess. It takes all night, a night during which panic causes you to black out several times."
"You try to hide yourself somewhere within the folds of these visions."
"Today you have summoned strength from reservoirs you hadn’t known were present in you—strength whose nature you’d never had cause to contemplate."
"People tell passed-down stories about mothers lifting up school buses with their bare hands to free their children pinned under the wheels."
"You know these stories probably aren’t true: but you also know that you’ve sawn through more bone today than the hacksaw from the gardener’s shed might otherwise have been thought capable of splitting."
"There’s seldom any action around this place."
"People are awful, even when they’re not trying to be."
"For every iconic pair of murderer’s eyes staring blankly into a police photographer’s lens, there are unremembered dead in small towns across the country going back centuries."
"Murder seldom inspires much lasting interest beyond the houses it strikes."
"Whole histories got wiped and recorded over by TV stations all the way up through the late 1970s."
"The greatest possible menace to a community lies just beneath the skin, its portents only readable, in retrospect, by those lucky enough to have survived its eruption."
"Try though you might, you can’t get around this rule."
"People want to own property; her father, in so many words, had drummed the lesson into her all her life."
"The comfort of living in a place you’d always known, the ease of knowing your parameters."
"There’s something appealing about being a visitor. The whole world’s a new thrill."
"The big reveal was a savings account Dad had opened for Derrick, years ago, without ever telling him about it."
"When the castle door came into view, as her car approached the curb, Lady Gates saw straightaway that aught was amiss."
"He looked for signs of construction as he’s landing this time."
"Most of the time, it’s hardly even worth trying to remember how it happened."
"The comfort of a story line he knew and could follow without difficulty was profound."
"But after a time the people did say, that the old customs were gone out from the land."
"Nobody likes a complainer and it doesn’t do any good."
"Everything about it was real except for the people, who could only be one way for me because I had a story to tell."
"A story has to be about something, it’s not just about the people in it and everything else that ever happened to them."
"You’re gonna use the kid against me now, is that it?"
"Nobody can know, you told me, what’s going on inside another person, even when they’re sitting there right in front of you."
"People have their ideas, and then there’s what’s real."
"It’s hard to get them to see the difference, especially when there are things you can’t talk about."
"Life is a process of forgetting: of moving old things out of the way to make room for new things."
"We make erasures to accommodate new data; these erasures are permanent."
"The sight of it tethered me to something real in myself."
"The fashioning of an anchor is, for some of us, a lifelong errand."
"Our younger selves are still around, waiting for somebody to invite them out to play."
"Our conversation hit a manic note early and stayed there; it was intoxicating."
"Everything is not more chaotic. Our earlier selves are still safe somewhere inside me."
"The vanishing age spoke to me, and the one just dawning looked a little too cool to hold an invitation with my name on it."
"It takes years working a job that involves travel to learn what a gift flexibility can be."
"To gaze upon a childhood home through adult eyes is to engage in an act of disenchantment."
"The essential quality of any discipline is consistency in practice."
"You learn to find the stories you need when you’re a kid."
"Sometimes, if the movie you’re watching is good enough, you can even suspend disbelief entirely."
"It’s in the nature of childhood to gild all surfaces it touches, to magnify things."
"What are we willing to trade for a clear view of things?"
"There’s a home field advantage to keeping your focus on places you already know a little."
"Superstitions, habits of thought that we seldom, if ever, acknowledge, even to ourselves."
"Not everybody deserves to get killed, but what are these guys supposed to do, everybody’s already thrown them away and they’ve got nothing."
"It matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell."