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3e3c4c7
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Wolf! Right here and now!
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Peter Straub |
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2ef558e
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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 whe..
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flashbacks
post-traumatic-stress-disorder
posttraumatic-stress-disorder
terror
ptsd
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Peter Straub |
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2691329
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The world is full of ghosts, and some of them are still people.
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Peter Straub |
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8da76a1
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You'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart.
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Peter Straub |
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2b431cc
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He was particularly disgruntled to see what he had taken for a bundle of old rags on the tracks outside was a human body. He did not say "Not again" (what he said was "Shit on this"), but "Not again" was what he meant."
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Peter Straub |
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83a6e38
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Intellectual labor is a common technique for the avoidance of thinking.
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peter-straub
thinking
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Peter Straub |
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6daac7c
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To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition - irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.
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mankind
madness
horror
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Peter Straub |
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175ae68
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She thought, instead, with longing of more books--of buying books--of slipping into a narrative of other people's lives. That was release.
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Peter Straub |
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9562754
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I liked the place I came from. But a lot of what I liked about it was that I had come from there.
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Peter Straub |
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4bf23c3
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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")"
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yearning
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Peter Straub |
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8bb43e1
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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.
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life
vileness
determination
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Peter Straub |
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e8ac71a
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To do magic, to do great magic, he has to know himself as a piece of the universe. A piece of the universe? A little piece that has all the rest of it in it. Everything outside of him is also inside of him.
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Peter Straub |
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e93a95c
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From a tale one expects a bit of wildness, of exaggeration and dramatic effect. The tale has no inherent concern with decorum, balance or harmony. ... A tale may not display a great deal of structural, psychological, or narrative sophistication, though it might possess all three, but it seldom takes its eye off its primary goal, the creation of a particular emotional state in its reader. Depending on the tale, that state could be wonder, am..
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writing
genre
horror
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Peter Straub |
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5816381
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Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging ..
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writing
genre
storytelling
horror
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Peter Straub |
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80930cc
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Wolves and those who see them are shot on sight.
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Peter Straub |
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4a6b422
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The mind was a trap--it was a cage that slammed down over you.
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Peter Straub |
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df72b0e
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The day was a long bolt of gray cloth; endless.
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Peter Straub |
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be20875
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Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.
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Peter Straub (Author) |
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a9e25a3
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Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up.
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Peter Straub |
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095898e
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David," I said, "no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends."
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Peter Straub |
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8b3d72c
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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")"
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Peter Straub |
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903e195
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He was having, under trying circumstances, the best time he could, which is one definition of heroism;
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Peter Straub |
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7480145
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The face was no longer bone, but animal - the face of a white wolf. "I forbid you nothing. " uttered the awful face. "You may go anywhere - you may open any door. But, little bird, remember that you must be prepared to accept whatever you find." The long jaws spread in a smile filled with teeth."
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Peter Straub |
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a553754
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What we do here is physiologically impossible. So we must train the body to accept the impossible, and then it will become possible.
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Peter Straub |
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3bdc8dc
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I'm being haunted," she blurted out. "My dear," he cooed. "Turn yourself into a tourist attraction and charge admission."
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mysterious
horror
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Peter Straub |
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b68e486
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God, in the orthodox view, causes famine, plague, and flood. Was God evil? Evil is a convenient fiction.
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Peter Straub |
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acc0b85
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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..
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wisdom
sandman
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Peter Straub |
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8bdc235
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When my childhood began coming back to me, I went off the rails for a bit. I became what you could charitably call "colorful." After a year or so of disgrace, I remembered that I was thirty-odd years old, no longer a child, that I had a calling of a kind, and I began to heal. Either childhood is a lot more painful the second time around, or it's just less bearable. None of us are as strong or as brave as the children we used to be."
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Peter Straub |
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0b09a3d
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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.
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metaphor
murder
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Peter Straub |
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4f64699
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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.
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Peter Straub |
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dbd797e
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A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else,
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Peter Straub |
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6ca6fd0
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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."
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Peter Straub |
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ec2a748
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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.
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Peter Straub (Author) |
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4b687ce
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The opposite of love is evil.
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Peter Straub A Dark Matter |
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9c173ac
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It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.
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Peter Straub |
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5182a54
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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.
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Peter Straub |
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725a553
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You know how when a woman gets angry, really angry, she can reach way back into herself and find rage enough to blow any man to pieces
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Peter Straub |
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30d91d9
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whatever his circumstances and surroundings, it was only a dead imagination that could call him a failure.
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Peter Straub |
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7c6334d
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Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.
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peter-straub
mystery
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Peter Straub |
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3c8b7b5
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Every night he comes thudding out of sleep drenched in sweat and staring into the dark. Something huge and scaly is twisting away into nothingness. There you are again, he thinks. There you are, old friend.
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Peter Straub |
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167f996
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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?
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Peter Straub |
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6ac4e07
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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.
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Peter Straub |
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60ad5fd
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Sometimes, it seems like sighted people can hardly see anything.
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Peter Straub |
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6db795a
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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
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Peter Straub |