Straub Quotes & Sayings

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

I don't shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that. — Peter Straub

He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby ... He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving. — Peter Straub

She wanted the world to stop and take notice before hobbling forward, forever changed. The problem was that no one seemed to be changed but her. — Emma Straub

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

She tasted what she had said and found it sour enough to be accurate. — Peter Straub

Everyone wants to get better as they go along, but sometimes it's all you can do to stay consistent. — Peter Straub

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

Adventure is a nameless joy — Peter Straub

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

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

and rising extremely unlike Phoebus with the dawn to prepare the schoolhouse. — Peter Straub

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

They were with their mother, and so they were acting like children. — Emma Straub

... 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

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

In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City") — Peter Straub

Dick Dart emerged from the ether during a flight from New York with my wife and children to Puerto Rico. — Peter Straub

A good boy almost all of the time, as well behaved as a loyal hound — Emma Straub

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

... She was as beautiful and lost as a landlocked mermaid. — Emma Straub

Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity. — Peter Straub

Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight. — Peter Straub

God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction. — Peter Straub

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps. — Peter Straub

Kids are forever, even if love isn't, right? — Emma Straub

What was the worst thing you've ever done?
I won't tell you that, but I'll tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me ... the most dreadful thing ... — Peter Straub

Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking. — Peter Straub

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off. — Peter Straub

Of course, the truth is that no one likes change. People in hell not only refuse to leave it, they invite you in, too. Even people who have blasted the other lives that touched their own blasted lives proudly declare in old age that they would not change a thing -- all that cursing and screaming was their life, by God, and it is not possible to imagine any other. Change introduces unpredictability, uncertainty, a universe of disorder. Right before an amoeba splits in two, it says to itself, uh uh, no way, I ain't gonna do that, nope. — Peter Straub

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

You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. — Peter Straub

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down. — Peter Straub

It is not believed that a people capable of inventing the genre of "oral painting" could have spawned the viaduct killer, and in any case no ghetto resident is permitted access to any other area of the city. ("A Short Guide To The City") — Peter Straub

Each new book is a tremendous challenge. — Peter Straub

It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it. — Peter Straub

Islands, being harder to get to, naturally separated some of the wheat from the chaff, which was the entire philosophy behind places like Nantucket, where children grew up feeling entitled to private beaches and loud pants. — Emma Straub

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

Leaving. That was the word she liked to use. Not going away, which implied a return, but leaving, which implied a jet plane. — Emma Straub

I had this dream in which I was having a cocktail party, and it was in a big room. I was standing at the door saying hello to people, and Jeffrey Dahmer walks up and I say, 'Oh Jeffrey, please go on in, it's right in there.' And then I say to myself, I just put Jeffrey Dahmer in a room with all my friends. — Peter Straub

It glowed in the mid-morning sunlight, the black shutters on the open windows eyelashes on a beautiful face. — Emma Straub

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

Wolf! Right here and now! — Peter Straub

Some people smoked crack in alleyways. Franny ate chocolate. On the scale of things, it seemed entirely reasonable. — Emma Straub

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

Laura wanted all of it back, every moment, so that she could live it all over again. — Emma Straub

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

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

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn't done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn't done anything to drive it away. — Emma Straub

There wasn't enough time in the world, not for the things that mattered most. — Emma Straub

In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one. — Peter Straub

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

So much of being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut. — Emma Straub

A lyrical, brave and complex novel that takes enormous risks and pulls them all off. — Peter Straub

She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride. — Peter Straub

That was another thing Ruby would miss about New York, if she were leaving: she's miss how much space people gave you. You could have a fucking sobbing fit on the subway and no one would mess with you. You could barf in a garbage can on the street corner and no one would mess with you. If you were giving off invisible vibes, people respected that. People thought New Yorkers were rude, but really they were just leaving you to your own stuff. It was respectful! In a city with so many people, a New Yorker would always pretend not to see you when you didn't want to be seen. — Emma Straub

Now whenever Franny or Jim spoke to someone who kept a car in Manhattan, they reacted with quiet horror, like people who'd been subjected to the rantings of a mentally ill person at a cocktail party. — Emma Straub

An average working day begins at 8 or 9 am, includes an hour for lunch, and ends at 5 or 6 pm. — Peter Straub

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

If the Enchanted Forest were in a movie, they'd always be playing Bob Dylan or Van Morrison or maybe even Leonard Cohen in the background. Greta thought about that a lot. Sometimes when she was taking a shower or helping her mom in the restaurant, she'd imagine what kind of scene it would be and what would be playing to set the mood. — Emma Straub

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

With American Morons, Glen Hirshberg confidently shoulders his way through the generational pack to claim his rightful place on the summit. These stories are smart, challenging, ripe with feeling, expansive in every way: Horror as it should be writ, and as only the best and most expressive can write it. — Peter Straub

Because dead people are just like you and me, they still want things. They look at us all the time, and they miss being alive. We have taste and color and smell and feelings, and they don't have any of those things.
They stare at us, they don't miss anything. They really see what's going on, and we hardly ever really see that. We're too busy thinking about things and getting everything wrong, so we miss ninety percent of what's happening. — Peter Straub

Nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side. — Peter Straub

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

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

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

They were just wading through the muck like everyone else. — Emma Straub

(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

Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better. — Peter Straub

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

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

He was having, under trying circumstances, the best time he could, which is one definition of heroism; — Peter Straub

Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration. — Peter Straub

She thought it was too bad it didn't work the other way around, so you could get braver and smarter as you move up in years. But — Peter Straub

I'm being haunted," she blurted out.
"My dear," he cooed. "Turn yourself into a tourist attraction and charge admission. — Peter Straub

Families were nothing more than hope cast out in a wide net, everyone wanting only the best. — Emma Straub

I had a connoisseur's ... appreciation of fear. — Peter Straub

What were parents anyway, except two people who had once thought they were the smartest people in the world? They were a delusional species, as tiny-brained as dinosaurs. — Emma Straub

And I found a statement by Hawthorne which helped to explain his method: "I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train of incidents in which the spiritual mechanism of the faery legend should be combined with the characters and manners of everyday life. — Peter Straub

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

Things that happen in seven years: Brad Pitt in Tibet. The itch. — Emma Straub

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

Terrifying ... A Dark Matter is populated with vivid, sympathetic characters, and driven by terrors both human and supernatural. It's the kind of book that's impossible to put down once it has been picked up. It kept me reading far into the night. Straub builds otherworldly terror without ever losing touch with his attractive cast of youngsters, who age beautifully. Put this one high on your list. — Stephen King

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa. — Peter Straub

Like most things, sex got better with age until one hit a certain plateau, and then it was like breakfast, unlikely to change unless one ran out of milk and was forced to improvise. — Emma Straub

Jim's vague understanding was that she had so much money that a strict job description was superfluous. — Emma Straub

Kindness refreshes and restores the tired and broken. — Gerard Straub

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

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

Sometimes it is right to fear the dark. — Peter Straub

No on thought that they would be anything more or less than perfectly fine. — Emma Straub

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do. — Peter Straub

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement. — Peter Straub

Me tienen hasta los huevos. It means I've had it up to my balls. — Emma Straub

A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else, — Peter Straub

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time. — Peter Straub

to be a hypocrite or a liar? Jim wasn't — Emma Straub

I believe I encountered death, which was a bit too much for a seven-year-old. — Peter Straub

But this story ends when you open the door. It doesn't matter if you managed to guess which room is mine, which door I closed behind me. You put your hand on the door handle, you knock, it's all over. End of story. By choosing one, you chose the other, too. Do you understand why? Those two consequences are joined at the hip, they're Siamese twins. Even if you picked the door with the lady behind it - all questions answered, all explanations given, your life solved for you - it's still true that you gave the tiger permission to jump. You gave your assent to catastrophe, you invited tragedy and horror to walk right in. You got lucky, that's all. Mallon — Peter Straub