The scariest monsters have the best masks.

I put my fingers around the unmarked ring of the spyglass and twisted. The scene became clear. Oh no! A hairy brown spider clung to a vine! I couldn’t go there! I’d go to the desert to find a dragon. I began to reset the spyglass, but then I stopped myself. A spider was worse than a dragon? No. My first monsters would be spiders, then.

Not all the monsters have fangs.

The monsters in our valley were destroyed that day. Only a very few survived. But that was all right, because we didn’t need monsters anymore. We had become them.

What unhappy beings men are! They constantly waver between false hopes and silly fears, and instead of relying on reason they create monsters to frighten themselves with, and phantoms which lead them astray.

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

Oh, monsters are scared, said Lettie. That’s why they’re monsters.

As a child, I was aware that, at night, infrared vision would reveal monsters hiding in the bedroom closet only if they were warm-blooded. But everybody knows that your average bedroom monster is reptilian and cold-blooded.