Stephen King

"Old Sparky seems such a thing of perversity when I look back on those days, such a deadly bit of folly. Fragile as blown glass, we are, even under the best of conditions. To kill each other with gas and electricity, and in cold blood? The folly. The horror."

"Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again. That's all I know, except that this happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair, of course."

"I think of John saying that Wharton killed the Detterick twins with their love for each other, and that it happens every day, all over the world. If it happens, God lets it happen, and when we say "I don't understand," God replies, "I don't care.""

"We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long."

"Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on, I think, but in little towns the makeup tends to be thin."

"This is how we go on: one day a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root canal at a time; boat builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things — fish and unicorns and men on horseback — but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on."

"Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't."

"link=Love|32px + link=Peace|32px = INFORMATION"

"I cried, all right. I sat there at my desk and I cried for her, for me, for both of us, for all of us. I can't remember hurting any more in my life than I did then. Hearts are tough, she said, most times hearts don't break, and I'm sure that's right ... but what about then? What about who we were then? What about hearts in Atlantis?"

"I don't think time matters much if you're a Breaker."

"Although it is difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened."

"Mike Anderson: After the contest for Job's soul is over and God wins, Job falls to his knees and and says, "God, why have you done this to me? All my life I've worshipped you, and yet you've destroyed my livestock. You've blighted my crops. You've killed my wife and my children. You gave me a hundred horrible diseases, and all because you had a bet going with the devil? Well, okay. But all I want to know, Lord — what your humble servant wants to know — is, why me?" Job waits, and just about when he's convinced himself that God's not gonna answer him, a thunderhead forms in the sky, lightning flashes, and a voice calls down, "Job, I guess there's just something about you that pisses me off.""

"André Linoge: Born in lust, turn to dust. Born in sin, come on in!"

"The world has teeth and it can bite you with them any time it wants."

"This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six! ... Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four! ... Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!"

"Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed."

"Hug and kiss whoever helped get you — financially, mentally, morally, emotionally — to this day. Parents, mentors, friends, teachers. If you're too uptight to do that, at least do the old handshake thing, but I recommend a hug and a kiss. Don't let the sun go down without saying thank you to someone, and without admitting to yourself that absolutely no one gets this far alone."

"Don't live in this place. If you're a grad student or if you have a few more courses to pick up, fine. But if you're still hanging out in Orono or Old Town three years from now, living like an undergraduate in some sleazy apartment or trailer park, there's something wrong with you. This is not Never-Neverland. Peter Pan graduated back in '73 and now has a nice little farm in Bethel. You are not the Lost Boys and Lost Girls, but if you stay here too long, you will grow the equivalent of donkey ears. For most of you, it's time to move on. If you didn't have a better time here than you did in high school, you're weird. If you want to stay here and keep being an undergraduate, you're very weird."

"Don't forget that you're a physical being with a power-plant to take care of and maintain. I'm talking about the bod under the blue gown. I'm not going to say that we're a lazy, overweight society, a fast-food eatin', SUV-ridin', soda-guzzlin', beer-chuggin', TV-watchin', size-XL-wearin', walk-don't-run generation...except I guess I just did."

"Don't forget that you're a mental being, with a humongous trillion gigawatt hard-drive at your disposal. Most of you have been running it like crazy for four years, moaning about all the books you've had to read, the papers you've had to write, and the tests you've had to take. Yet thanks to that hard-drive and about a thousand cups of coffee, you made it. Just...let me put it this way. I can find out where you live. I have my resources. And if I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but the Reader's Digest, nothing on your bedroom nighttable but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming "Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?" I sound like I'm joking about this, but I'm not. You've got a brain under the cap you're wearing. Take care of the damned thing. Try to remember there's more to life than Vin Diesel and Tom Cruise. It wouldn't kill you to go to a movie once a month that has subtitles on the bottom of the screen. You can read them, you went to college, right?"

"Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood, but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. It was as if it had been waiting to go. On October 1, God was in His heaven, the stock market stood at 10,140, and most of the planes were on time (except for those landing and taking off in Chicago, and that was to be expected). Two weeks later the skies belonged to the birds again and the stock market was a memory. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory."

"The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1, 1999. The term was a misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane. The name hardly mattered, in any case. What mattered was the effect."

"Phoner: "Blet ky-yam doe-ram kazzalah a babbalah!" Clay Riddell: "I'll a-babbalah your a-kazzalah, you fuck!""

"He had a wife who was still sort of his responsibility, and when it came to his son there was no sort-of at all. Even thinking of Johnny was dangerous. Every time his mind turned to the boy, Clay felt a panic-rat inside his mind, ready to burst free of the flimsy cage that held it and start gnawing anything it could get at with its sharp little teeth. If he could make sure Johnny and Sharon were okay, he could keep the rat in its cage and plan what to do next. But if he did something stupid, he wouldn't be able to help anyone. In fact, he would make things worse for the people here."

"The phone crazies own the days; when the stars come out, that's us. We're like vampires. We've been banished to the night. Up close we know each other because we can still talk; at a little distance we can be pretty sure of each other by the packs we wear and the guns more and more of us carry; but at a distance, the one sure sign is the waving flashlight beam. Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out in our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People."

"What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the Earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle."

"Alice had managed to get herself back under some sort of control, but it was thin. Thin enough to read a newspaper through, his bingo-playing mother might have said. Although a kid herself, Alice had managed to keep herself shiny-side up mostly for the other kid's sake, so he wouldn't give way entirely."

"To the public eye, the spouses of well-known writers are all but invisible, and no one knew it better than Lisey Landon. Her husband won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, but Lisey had given one interview in her life. This was for the well-known women's magazine that publishes the column "Yes, I'm Married to Him!" She spent roughly half of its five hundred word length explaining that her nickname rhymed with "CeeCee". Most of the other half had to do with her recipe for slow-cooked roast beef. Lisey's sister Amanda said that the picture accompanying the interview made Lisey look fat.None of Lisey's sister were immune to the pleasures of setting the cat among the pigeons ("stirring up a stink" had been their father's phrase for it), or having a good natter about someone else's dirty laundry, but the only one Lisey had a hard time liking was this same Amanda. Eldest (and oddest) of the onetime Debusher girls of Lisbon Falls, Amanda currently lived alone, in a house which Lisey had provided, a small, weather-tight place not too far from Castle View where Lisey, Darla, and Cantata could keep a eye on her. Lisey had bought it for her seven years ago, five before Scott died. Died Young. Died Before His Time, as the saying was. Lisey still had trouble believing he'd been gone for two years. It seemed both longer and the blink of an eye."

"Lisey?" Amanda asked. Her brow was deeply furrowed."I'm sorry," Lisey said. "I just kind of...went off there for a second"."You often do," Amanda said. "I think you got it from Scott. Pay attention, Lisey. I made a little number on each of his magazines and journals and scholarly things. The ones piled over there against the wall." Lisey nodded as if she knew where this was going. "I made the numbers in pencil, just light," Amanda went on. "Always when you're back was turned or you were somewhere else, because I thought if you saw you might have told me to stop.""I wouldnt've." She took the little notebook which was limp with its owner sweat. "Eight hundred and forty six! That many!" And she knew the publications running along the wall weren't the sort she herself might read and have in the house, ones like O and Good Housekeeping and Ms., but rather Little Sewanee Review and Glimmer Train and things with incomprehensible names like Piskya."Quite a few more than that," Amanda said, and cocked a thumb at the piles of books and journals. When Lisey really looked at them, she saw that her sister was right. Many more than eight hundred and forty-some. Had to be. "Almost three thousand in all, and where you'll put them or who'd want them I'm sure I can't say. No, these eight hundred and forty-six is just the number that have pictures of you."

"He told himself that everything was fine — he only had to look at the sleeping dog on the floor if he doubted — but in the middle of the night it was hard to be an optimist. When the dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies."

"A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men."

"Selectman Rennie's assumption that no one had seen Brenda come to his house that morning was correct. But she was seen in her morning travels, not by one person but by three, including one who also lived on Mill Street. If Big Jim had known, would the knowledge have given him pause? Doubtful; by then he was committed to his course and it was too late to turn back. But it might have caused him to reflect (for he was a reflective man, in his own way) on murder's similarity to Lay's potato chips: it's hard to stop with just one."

"Denial gives way to acceptance; acceptance breeds dependence. Anyone who's ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that, too. Sick people need someone who will bring them their pills and glasses of cold sweet juice to wash them down with. They need someone to soothe their aching joints with arnica gel. They need someone to sit with them when the night is dark and the hours stretch out. They need someone to say, Sleep now, it will be better in the morning. I'm here, so sleep. Sleep now. Sleep and let me take care of everything."

"America's two great specialties are demagogues and rock and roll, and we've all heard plenty of both in our time."

"But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don't think it's in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart."

"The past is obdurate. it doesn't want to change."

"This time Brady wonders what Freddi would say if he told her what life was like for him when he was a kid. That was when he killed his brother. And his mother covered it up. Why would she not? After all, it had sort of been her idea."

"Suicide proves guilt. He remembers Lieutenant Morrissey saying that, but Hodges himself has always had his doubts, and lately those doubts have been stronger than ever. What he knows now is that guilt isn't the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV."

"Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That's all history is, after all: scar tissue."

"These girls will remember this night for the rest of their lives. The music. The excitement. The beachballs flying above the swaying, dancing crowd. They will read about the explosion that didn't happen in the newspapers, but to the young, tragedies that don't happen are only dreams. The memories: they're the reality."

"The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I've thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back." The book is about 700 pages long, and I'm thinking, "There's probably a good 350-page novel in there.""

"Well, I don't like Dreamcatcher very much. Dreamcatcher was written after the accident. [In 1999, King was hit by a van while taking a walk and left severely injured.] I was using a lot of Oxycontin for pain. And I couldn't work on a computer back then because it hurt too much to sit in that position. So I wrote the whole thing longhand. And I was pretty stoned when I wrote it, because of the Oxy, and that's another book that shows the drugs at work."

"Lisey's Story. That one felt like an important book to me because it was about marriage, and I'd never written about that. I wanted to talk about two things: One is the secret world that people build inside a marriage, and the other was that even in that intimate world, there's still things that we don't know about each other."

"The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was Bambi."

"Jordan: "I thought when you get older, the nightmares go away?" Clay Riddell: "No. You still have them. They just grow up, too.""

"Terry," Ralph said. He could see drops of sweat from his forehead falling onto Terry's face, where they mixed with the blood from the head wound. "Terry, you're going to die. Do you understand me? He got you, and he got you good. "You are going to die". "No!" Marcy shrieked. No, he can't! The girls need their daddy! He can't!" She was trying to get to him, and this time it was Alec Pelley- pale and grave- who held her back. Howie had gotten to his knees, but he did not attempt to interfere again, either. "Where... get me?" "Your chest, Terry. He got you in the heart, or just above it. You need to make a dying declaration, okay? You need to tell me you killed Frank Peterson. This is your chance to clear your conscience." Terry smiled, and a thin trickle of blood spilled from either side of his mouth. "But I didn't," he said. His voice was low, little more than a whisper, but perfectly audible. "I didn't, so tell me, Ralph... how are you going to clear yours?"

""Please." He thought to say, Don't make me beg, but that was wrong because it wasn't enough. "I'm begging you. Please talk to me." She held up the cigarette and uttered a terrible toneless laugh. "I thought, now that the little lice are gone, I can have a smoke on my doorstep. And look, here's the big louse, the louse of louses. Last warning, Mr. Louse who got my husband killed. Get... the fuck... off my doorstep." "What if he didn't do it?" Her eyes widened and the pressure of her hand on the door slackened, at least for the moment. "What if he...? Jesus Christ, he told you he didn't do it! He told you as he lay there dying! What else do you want, a hand-delivered telegram from the Angel Gabriel?" "If he didn't, whoever did is still out there, and he's responsible for the destruction of the Peterson family, as well as yours." She considered this for a moment, then said: "Oliver Peterson is dead because you and that sonofabitch Samuels had to put on your circus. And you killed him, didn't you, Detective Anderson? Shot him in the head. Got your man. Excuse me, your boy." She slammed the door in his face. Ralph again raised his hand to knock, thought better of it, and turned away."

"Go down, Jack. Get them and I'll take the cancer away. Oh, but right now he had more immediate concerns, didn't he? He was swelling up like a waterlogged sponge. The snakebite poison, too. I can make you well. Jack wasn't sure he could believe Tat-Man, but he understood he had no choice. Also, there was Anderson. Mr. No Opinion didn't get to walk away from this. It was all his fault, and he didn't get to walk away. He started down the path at a shambling trot, clutching the barrel of the Winchester and using the stock as a cane. His second fall came when the rocky scree slid away under his left foot and his swollen, throbbing right leg wasn't able to compensate. The leg of his pants split open the next time he went down, disclosing flesh that was turning purplish-black and necrotic. He clawed at the rocks and got to his feet again, his face puffing and running with sweat. He was pretty sure he was going to die on this godforsaken chunk of rock and weeds, but he was goddamned if he was going to do it alone."

"According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Most are found. Thousands are not."

"Great events turn on small hinges."