Robert Bloch Quotes

Looking back, looking back and trying to figure what made you that way, several things stand out in your mind. There may have been more than several. Maybe there were a hundred. Maybe a thousand. Small events, little episodes, all pointing you in the same direction, so that you might think you had free will when you wobbled from side to side on the track, but there were no switches for you to throw, no turnings to choose.

He pressed a switch and the bedside lamp blossomed and sent forth yellow petals of light.

He managed to retain a cheerful smile at all times — though, in the dreams, he screamed.

It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.

Mother had wandered off — where? Was she out on the highway, ready to be picked up by anyone who might come driving by? Was she still suffering a hysterical reaction, would the shock of what she had done cause her to blurt out the truth to whoever came along and found her? Had she actually run away, or was she merely in a daze? Maybe she’d gone down past the woods back of the house, along the narrow ten-acre strip of their land which stretched off into the swamp. Wouldn’t it be better to search for her first? Norman sighed and shook

Once you began speculation about that, once you admited to yourself that you didn't really know how another person's mind operated, then you came up against the ultimate admission — anything was possible.

As she reached the landing, the thunder came. The whole house seemed to shake with it.

Do shadows cast shadows of their own?

"The sun disappeared into the woods and shadows started slinking out from between the trees."

short story, Pumpkin

And then, as he ripped back the shower curtains and stared down at the hacked and twisted thing sprawled on the floor of the stall, he realized that Mother had used her keys.

Evil exists everywhere. Sometimes I think our limited senses are designed to protect us from awareness of its presence. We trust them to provide us with knowledge but it may be that they block out realization of horrors we cannot bear.

All at once she could hear the sullen patter of the rain and sense the sigh of the wind behind it.

"We all go a little mad sometimes"
Norman Bates

The sun surrendered its splendor — why, it was like poetry; he was a poet; Norman smiled. He was many things. If they only knew — — But

And here, all along, she'd thought of herself as being so calm, so cool, so composed.