Duty and conscience were, for Theodora, attributes which belonged properly to Girl Scouts. - Shirley Jackson

Well, she asked, how do you gentlemen like living in a haunted house?
It's perfectly fine, Luke said, perfectly fine. It gives me an excuse to have a drink in the middle of the night.

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer — any writer, beginning or otherwise — is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or — kindest of all — goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.

I am like a small creature swallowed whole by a monster, she thought, and the monster feels my tiny little movements inside.