"Some stories, she'd say, the more you tell them, the faster you use them up. Those kind, the drama burns off, and every version, they sound more silly and flat. The other kind of story, it uses you up. The more you tell it, the stronger it gets. Those kind of stories only remind you how stupid you were. Are. Will always be."

"Their teeth white, as if they never used teeth for anything except to smile."

"That’s the American Dream: to make your life into something you can sell."

"Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"The world will always punish the few people with special talents the rest of us don’t recognize as real."

"Some stories, you use up. Others use you up."

"Some stories, Mr.Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288"

"People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves."

""The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors." p144"

""I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again." p76"

"If we can forgive what's been done to us... If we can forgive what we've done to others... If we can leave our stories behind. Our being victims and villains. Only then can we maybe rescue the world."

"Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences."

"We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one."

"If there's a trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more."

"That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed."

"Chapter 19, Absolution"

"We should forgive God..."

"The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look."

"I lost my virginity through my ear."

"With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved."

""What matters," Sister Vigilante says, "is, people need a monster they can believe in." A true horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us."

""Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you." p205"

"As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.'"

"This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat."

"You can't unfuck a kid. Once you fuck a kid, you can't get that genie back in the bottle."

"For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die."

"Every apostle or disciple," Mrs. Clarke says, "as much as their running to follow they're savior-they're running just as hard to escape something else."

"In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering. It was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process."

"The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth. Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes round. We're the rocks. And what happens to us--the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse--why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright."

"You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever."

"A journalist has a right... ...and a duty, to destroy the golden calves he helps create."

"Keep my love safe; take my love safe to where he goes, give him joy in who he sees, and make him a cause of joy in those who see him."

"So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our mind. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little."

"True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring—once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome... except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners."

"Might I recline briefly at your feet miss? Your beauty has loosened my knees. I am sure a few moments looking up at your profile from below with the back of my head on these cool tiles will put me right."

"Bird and bear and hare and fish, Give my love her fondest wish."

"If you love me, then love me."

"It seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended."

"Time is a face on the water."

"Death for you, life for my crop."

"Ka like the wind."

"Why did the dead baby cross the road? ... Because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!"

"I'm never done with The Dark Tower. The thing about The Dark Tower is that those books were never edited, so I look at them as first drafts. And by the time I got to the fifth or sixth book, I'm thinking to myself, "This is really all one novel." It drives me crazy. The thing is to try to find the time to rewrite them. There's a missing element – a big battle at a place called Jericho Hill. And that whole thing should be written, and I've thought about it several times, and I don't know how to get into it."

"Pray for rain all you like, but dig a well as you do it."

"“There's nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”"

"“What if I fall?', Tim cried."

"“It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child's heart, and then his child's heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world.”"

"“In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.”"