It

“‘They float,’ the clown said. ‘Down here we all float; pretty soon your friend will float too.’” 

Pennywise uses his catchphrase for the second time, this time on Hagarty. It is signaling that he lives beneath Derry, in the sewers, and that when It takes someone, they will also go down into the drains with It. Later, when Audra is in the spiderweb, she appears to be floating.

“Maybe this isn’t home, nor ever was—maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you finally have to face the thing in the dark.”

As he drives towards Derry, what Eddie has thought of as his home—his life with Myra—feels less real than Derry, even though he has forgotten most of what happened to him there. The concept of home is usually presented as a source of comfort and familiarity. For the members of the Losers’ Club, home has always been a dark force, filled with fear. 

“‘You may think you’ve stumbled on the worst of Derry’s secrets… but there is always one more. And one more.’”

The historian Carson tells Mike that researching Derry’s history—particularly the history of its violence—can be too much for people. He reminds Mike that other historians have committed suicide. This is a frightening reminder, given that the reader knows Stanley has killed himself in the previous section. There is no end to Derry’s darkness, so research never yields anything but more horror. 

“Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there, too.” 

The haiku that Ben writes for Beverly shows that he is in love with her, and also that he has a poetic side. Later, she will reveal that she had always known he was the one who sent it to her. Even as a child, she had understood that Ben had an artistic, romantic side, which may be why she leaves with him for Omaha after their final battle with It. 

“Ben, who had seemed so timid and unsure the day before, became a confident general once he was fully involved in the actual construction of the dam.”

As long as he is doing a task he is good at, Ben is confident. The others are in awe of his ability to design and build the damn, as is Mr. Nell. Ben has no problems delegating, which will eventually serve him well when he becomes a famous architect. Before he had friends, he was never able to discover that he was an effective leader.

“We’re being drawn into something. Being picked and chosen. None of this is accidental. Are we all here yet?”

Richie sees Bradley and knows that he is not one of them, but he isn’t sure what his thought means. Bill will later experience a similar premonition that their group was always meant to come together, and that they were steered towards each other by a power he comes to call the Other. There is a benevolent force in the universe to counteract Its evil.

“His face was set, almost stern. And later Beverly would think that perhaps only Stanley realized that they had taken another step toward some unthinkable confrontation.”

After helping clean up the blood in Beverly’s bathroom, she sees that Stanley is viewing things differently than the rest of him. Stanley has an intuitive understanding that they are antagonizing It with every small act of defiance and support for one another. This is in line with his nature, which makes him an effective accountant as an adult, but it also makes him unable to return to Derry.

“‘In nightmares we can think the worst. That’s what they’re for, I guess.’” 

Mike’s dad tells him the purpose of nightmares as he recounts the story of the Black Spot fire. He sees nightmares as a chance for people to work out the worst thoughts they can have, but safely. Mike knows differently: he knows that in Derry, the worst things he can think of are real.

“Come home come home come home.”

This is the message Pennywise writes in blood on a wall. Mike shows them a police photo of the wall, where a fifth-grader was murdered. They know the message is for them. Knowing that It wants them to come back scares them, and they doubt whether they are strong enough to beat It again.

“Using intuition is a hard thing for grownups to do, and that’s the main reason I think it might be the right thing for us to do.”

The adults are less assured about the course they should take than they were as children. Their instincts as children led them to find It, fight It, and wound It. As grownups, they are more uncertain and Mike’s suggestion that they take walking tours of Derry is admittedly a guess. He is asking that they take a day to try to act like children and use their intuitions. 

“Kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world.”

Ben reflects on his success as an architect, which relies on order, mathematics, and predictability. The invisible world, until his return to Derry, has been lost to him as an adult. He thinks of all of the brushes with death he and his friends had and marvels that they were so resilient. He feels more fragile as an adult and more poorly equipped to deal with the inexplicable. 

“I spent the happiest times of my childhood down there in that mess.”

As an adult, Eddie looks into the Barrens. He realizes that his life at home with his mother was unhappy because even being in the Barrens had been more fun for him. He realizes again that his home life had been unhealthy, and that his illness had mostly be in his head. 

“In the end he had outgrown the nightmares that were on the other side of all those laughs. Or he thought he had. Until today, when the word grownup suddenly stopped making sense to his own ears.”

Richie reflects on the forces that drove him to become a DJ and which had always made him a loudmouth. He had tried to make people laugh so that he did not have time to reflect on his own nightmares. Now that he is back in Derry, seeing the same nightmares he saw as a child, he no longer has a clear definition of what grownup means. 

“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”

Bill remembers these words when he finds Silver in the used shop. He can’t remember what they mean. Mike will later tell him that the sentence is a famous tongue twister used for stutterers to practice with. He says Bill said it to himself constantly in the summer of 1958. Later, the words will take on a talismanic effect, and Bill repeats them at the moments of his greatest danger. 

“After the horror in the sewers, he didn’t seem to mind about anything.”

In August of 1958, Henry admits to killing all of the children. He is apathetic towards everything, now that he saw Victor and Belch killed by It. He knows that there are horrors in the world worse than anyone else knows, and he is not going to act upset by a mere murder conviction or his transfer to Juniper Hill. 

“‘Wasn’t no cover up. It was just that no one talked about it much.’” 

Mr. Keene, the man who tells Mike about the Bradley Gang massacre, says they didn’t even need to cover it up to avoid local attention. Despite the fact that over 60 citizens had participated in a mass murder in broad daylight, no one had discussed it to the point where the story had gotten out. Events like this were commonplace enough in Derry that no one seemed to think they were noteworthy. 

“We’re all together now. Oh God help us. Now it really starts.”

After Mike joins the group, Bill intuits that their group is complete. Now that they are seven, the real confrontation begins, and his sense that they are predestined to fight together is stronger than ever. But his fright is apparent, and the completion of the group of friends is not cause for celebration. It is an omen of the terror to come. 

“I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life. It didn’t put an end to me as a person. I think it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain.”

After Henry breaks Eddie’s arm, Eddie laughs. He tells the others about Mr. Keene and his claim that the aspirator was a placebo. Eddie now has a point of comparison with what he thought was the pain caused by his asthma and by all of the illnesses his mother insists that he has. It is real pain that shows him how he worried about all of the wrong things.  

“This house was a special place, a kind of station, one of the places in Derry, perhaps, in which It was able to find Its way into the overworld. This stinking rotted house where everything was somehow wrong.”

Ben’s architectural instincts tell him that the house on Neibolt Street is wrong. Its angles are wrong, and its design is unnatural. He attributes these qualities to the reason It likes to use the house as an entry point when it comes above ground. Along with the Canal and the Standpipe, it is one of Derry’s most sinister locations.

“It is faith that monsters live on.”

Mike writes that adults have less faith than children have. Monsters do not exist in the world of adults because adults do not believe in monsters. It is the belief of the children that give It power. When the kids laugh at It, or mock it, It experiences pain, because their absence of terror shows a lack of belief in Its power. This is why something like Eddie’s aspirator can cause It pain, because Eddie's use of it as a weapon is so ridiculous that it shows Eddie feels no fear in that moment. 

“‘There’s another force—at least there was when we were kids—that wanted us to stay alive and do the job. Maybe it’s still there.’” 

Before they go back into the sewers as adults, Mike remembers that there was another presence there that helped them. This is what Bill will refer to as the Other. Mike believes that the Other force has given them a job to do. They are instruments of justice for this benevolent power, as long as it is still down there. 

“‘Derry is It. They won’t hear, they won’t see, they won’t know.’”

After Eddie kills Henry, Beverly says they can’t call the police. The police are part of Derry, and Derry is It. By involving other people, they will involve It, and this will work against them. Much as they felt that, as children, they could not involve other adults in their struggle, they see that they have to do everything on their own. 

“Before the universe there had been only two things. One was Itself and one was The Turtle. The Turtle was a stupid old thing that never came out of its shell.” 

It recalls Its own beginnings. It says that there was nothing in the beginning besides It and the Turtle. It describes the Turtle as powerless and stupid but does not mention the power that Bill calls the Other. This raises the question of whether It knows that the Other exists, or whether the Other has managed to hide its existence from It.