Great Throughts Treasury

"A lone black cloud looking for rain."

"All I know is that things seem to happen. And, my dear, there are lunatic asylums all over the world filled with people who dabbled in the occult."

"All-good, like the vain, capricious, cruel God of Job? With all of eternity at His disposal, what fiendish new tortures might He not devise?"

"Are you the person in Regan? asked the psychiatrist. Regan nodded. Who are you? Nowonmai, she answered gutturally. That?s your name? Another nod. You?re a man? She said, Say. Did you answer? Say. If that?s ?yes,? nod your head. Regan nodded. Are you speaking in a foreign language? Say. Where do you come from? Dog. You say that you come from a dog? Dogmorfmocion, Regan replied."

"And the sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence."

"Arms folded across his chest, Klein was sitting on the edge of his desk. Well, the EEG would have proved that she had it, he said, but the lack of dysrhythmia doesn?t prove to me conclusively that she doesn?t. It might be hysteria, but the pattern before and after her convulsion was much too striking. Chris furrowed her brow. You know, you keep on saying that, Doc??convulsion."

"Adieu, sucky speed-reading critics and reviewers!"

"After all, Satan does not need to start a war. To do this, we have enough ourselves themselves."

"At the edge of his dreams, there was often a sound like the faint, distant cry of someone in distress, and for minutes after waking, he would feel the anxiety of some duty unfulfilled."

"As far as God goes, I _am_ a nonbeliever. Still am. But when it comes to a devil---well, that's something else."

"Because if there is Satan then there is also God."

"Blessed flatulence! Died, is it? Died? Karras, heal it! - Barked the devil."

"Bill, now! Shoot now! Kill me now!"

"At last I realized that God would never ask of me that which I know to be psychologically impossible; that the love which He asked was in my will and not meant to be felt as emotion at all. Not at all. He was asking that I act with love; that I do unto others; and that I should do it unto those who repelled me, I believe, was a greater act of love than any other."

"Blad-dy ? But this is not a name ... is a toilet !"

"But a myth, to speak plainly, to me is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn't otherwise swallow, like maybe lima beans."

"But I'll tell you something, Father; you give me Regan's identical twin: same face, same voice, same smell, same everything down to the way she dots her i's, and still I'd know in a second that it wasn't really her! I'd know it! I'd know it in my gut and I'm telling you I know that thing upstairs is not my daughter! I know it! I know!"

"carrot-and-stick reinforcement? the behaviorists are telling us is needed for this bird to carry out these operations, thirteen different types of construction jobs? B. F. Skinner did a very good thing: in World War"

"Chris made a telephone call to her doctor in Los Angeles to ask him for a referral to a local psychiatrist for Regan."

"Did you get my message? I left it with Keating. Nice girl. Good heart."

"Catatonics are so easy to possess."

"Drunk right now, Amfortas suspected, or high on amphetamine."

"Eternity, where time does not exist and so the future and the past are both the present."

"Earth is a homicide victim. We lose our children. There are wars. Disease. And God comes strolling by like a cosmic Billie Burke."

"For days or even weeks. It isn?t rare to find destructive, even criminal behavior. There?s such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by"

"For I think belief in God is not a matter of reason at all; I think it finally is a matter of love."

"Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?"

"Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we?re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn?t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn?t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn?t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life."

"From the cab stepped a tall old man. Black raincoat and hat and a battered valise. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless, staring at the house. The cab pulled away and rounded the corner of Thirty-sixty Street. Kinderman quickly pulled out to follow. AS he turned the corner, he noticed that the tall old man hadn't moved but was standing under the streetlight glow, in mist, like a melancholy traveler frozen in time."

"From these he had fled into love, but now the love had grown cold, and in the night he heard it whistling through the chambers of his heart like a lost and gently crying wind."

"Go in peace, my child. May the Schwartz be with you."

"God is the only landlord that Mama never called cheater."

"God was alien and cruel."

"Have the syndrome, Mrs. MacNeil. For example, the untidiness; the pugnacity; behavior that?s socially embarrassing; the automatism; and of course, the seizures that made the bed shake. Usually, that?s followed by either wetting the bed or vomiting, or both,"

"God never talks. But the devil keeps advertising, Father. The devil does a lot of commercials."

"He could not bear to search for Christ again in stench and hollow eyes; for the Christ of pus and bleeding excrement, the Christ who could not be. In"

"He dared not love again and lose. That loss was too great, that pain too keen."

"He started his engine and turned on the windshield wipers in time to see a tall old man stepping out of the cab. He paid the driver, then turned and stood motionless under a misty streetlamp?s glow, staring up at a window of the house like a melancholy traveler frozen in time. As"

"He drank and behaved outrageously because it was expected of him: he was living up to his legend."

"Henri Bergson thought the principal function of the brain was to filter out most of reality so that we could focus on the tasks of earthly life, he said. When the filter is weakened by a powerful drug, what we see is not delusion but the truth."

"He thought of the death and the endless suffering that accompanied it. To the Aztecs who pulled the still-beating heart from the body of the victims; cancer; children three years buried alive. He wondered if God was a foreign entity and ruthless. Then he remembered the music of Beethoven, the infinite variety of things, the funny side of them and '' Long live Karamazov! " and sweetness. He raised his eyes to the sun peeking behind the streaking orange reflections Capitol in the Potomac and then lowered them about the horrible violence that lay at his feet. Between man and his creator something must have gone wrong: there it is the test, on the quay in front of the boathouse."

"Her shoes were comfortable. They reflected her hope for the evening."

"How many husbands and wives must believe they have fallen out of love because their hearts no longer race at the sight of their beloveds!"

"Horror does not interest me, and so I know little of its practicioners, old or current"

"I cannot believe you just said that. What kind of a world is this? Are you an animal? Do you know what Macbeth is about? I'll tell you. It's a play about the numbing of the moral sense. I tell Ryan that we have nothing to go on in this case. You know what he says to me? "Win some, lose some." You're a racist, Ryan. Did you know that?"

"I didn?t, Chris told him. She was also sedated when last we spoke? Yes, she was. I thought I saw her at her window that day. Well, you?re mistaken. It could be. Perhaps so. I?m not sure. Listen, why are you asking all this? Well, a clear"

"How many husbands and wives, Merrin uttered sadly, must believe they have fallen out of love because their hearts no longer race at the sight of their beloveds. Ah, dear God! He shook his head. And then he nodded. There it lies, I think, Damien ? possession; not in wars, as some tend to believe; not so much; and very rarely in extraordinary interventions such as here ? this girl ? this poor child. No, I tend to see possession most often in the little things, Damien: in the senseless, petty spites and misunderstandings; the cruel and cutting word that leaps unbidden to the tongue between friends. Between lovers. Between husbands and wives. Enough of these and we have no need of Satan to manage our wars; these we manage for ourselves ? for ourselves."

"I get cassettes near Academy Award time of every movie that's made that thinks it has some kind of chance for a nomination - that's when I watch my movies."

"I didn't read The Haunting of Hill House until sometime early in the 1990's."

"I have dreams of a rose... and falling down a long flight of steps."