Olivia: All those colors. They’re all gone now, Hugh. And there’s only one left. I’m scared. That’s all I am. There’s nothing left. I’m only scared.
Steven : I’ve seen a lot of ghosts. Just not the way you think.
Shirley: “To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defies our boundaries and illuminates our souls.”
Mrs. Dudley: No, dear. Use your cup of stars. Insist on your cup of stars. Once they’ve strapped you into being like everyone else, you’ll never see your cup of stars again.
Shirley: “No, the menace of the supernatural is that it attacks where modern minds are weakest, where we have abandoned our protective armor of superstition and have no substitute defense.”
Shirley: “It watches,” he added suddenly. “The house. It watches every move you make.”
Theodora : Imagine the worst thing possible, assume it’s true, and go from there.
Theo : I’m drawing boundaries, which is something you should look in to.
Steven : A ghost can be a lot of things. A memory, a daydream, a secret. Grief, anger, guilt. But, in my experience, most times they’re just what we want to see.
Olivia: When you’re little, you learn how to see things that aren’t there. And when you grow up, you learn how to make them real.
Shirley: “Fear and guilt are sisters;”
Nell: Mom says that a house is like a body. And every house has eyes and bones and skin. A face. This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart, a stomach.
Steven : No live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
Theodora : I don’t feel anything.
Steven : Just because someone is a good person. Just because you care about them doesn’t mean they won’t burn you.
Nell: Now you stand there and you talk about ghosts and spirits. And you sell tickets for the privilege. And yet you don’t believe in any of it.
Shirley: “Fear,” the doctor said, “is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.”
Steven: Most times, a ghost is a wish.
Hugh: Some things can’t be told. You live them or you don’t. But they can’t be told. I’m sorry
Shirley: “All I could think of when I got a look at the place from the outside was what fun it would be to stand out there and watch it burn down.”
Shirley: “Fear is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway,”
Steven : There’s natural phenomena that we understand and there’s natural phenomena that we don’t. Primitive humans used to die of fright during an eclipse. They had no idea what it was. The eye of an angry god. An evil spirit. Nothing supernatural about it, though. Once we understood what it was, well, it was just natural.
Shirley: “It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house ; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.”