"“Well,” Eddie said, “What was behind Door Number One wasn’t so hot, and what was behind Door Number Two was even worse, so now, instead of quitting like sane people, we’re going to go right ahead and check out Door Number Three. The way things have been going, I think it’s likely to be something like Godzilla or Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster, but I’m an optimist. I’m still hoping for the stainless steel cookware.”"

"If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast. To be a beast is perhaps bearable, although the man who has become one will surely pay hell’s own price in the end, but if you should gain your object? What if you should, heartless, storm the Dark Tower and win it? What could you do except degenerate from beast to monster? To gain one’s object as a beast would only be bitterly comic, like giving a magnifying glass to an elephaunt. But to gain one’s object as a monster…To pay hell is one thing. But do you want to own it?"

"“Won’t somebody please explain where I am and how I got here?” the woman in the wheelchair asked – almost pleaded.“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,” Eddie said. “You ain’t in Kansas anymore.”"

""God pisses down the back of your neck every day but only drowns you once"."

"In a world that was clearly going to hell head-first, what was so low about getting high?"

"Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame."

"You’re a Tower Junkie, Roland."

"There are people who need people to need them. The reason you don’t understand is because you’re not one of those people. You’d use me and then toss me away like a paper bag if that’s what it came down to. God fucked you, my friend. You’re just smart enough so it would hurt you to do that, and just hard enough so you’d go ahead and do it anyway. You wouldn’t be able to help yourself. If I was lying on the beach there and screaming for help, you’d walk over me as if I was between you and your goddamn Tower."

"“Who are you?” Eddie screams at him.“Your destiny, Eddie,” the gunslinger whispers."

""Jesus Christ, when these DO shoot, they really blow holes in things"."

"Good. Call it fluttergork if you want, pr... Eddie. Just do it"

"As Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie would have put it, Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life’s a fiction and the world’s a lie, so put on some Creedence and let’s get high."

"When the only fast way you could get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves, you were dealing with one heavy monkey."

"The door had hinges, but they were fastened to nothing—or so it seems, the gunslinger thought. This is a mystery, a most marvelous mystery, but does it really matter? You are dying. Your own mystery—the only one that really matters to any man or woman in the end—approaches."

"Had he come this far just to die, then? He would not. And if he were to die in spite of his determination, he would die on his way to the Tower."

"Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?..."You dare not."And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not."

"Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things—as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it's already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up."Think how small such a concept of things make us, gunslinger! If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for such a race of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see... what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?"

"The universe (he said) is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain—although it may think it can—the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. One company (or cabal) led the way in this regard: North Central Positronics, it called itself. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts, there were remarkably few insights."

"Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final answer on that subject: “NEVER!”“THEN LET THERE BE LIGHT!” And there was light, crashing in on him like a hammer, a great and primordial light."

"Come, come, come. You progress, gunslinger! Oh, how I envy you. We make great magic together, you and I. You kill me no more than you kill yourself. Mother-may-I? Yes-you-may."

"The man in black smiled. "Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more lies?""I thought we had been."But the man in black persisted as if Roland hadn't spoken. "Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland. Only equals speak the truth, that's my thought on't. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard. How tiresome!""

"Perhaps they only looked for a Jesus to heal them, raise them Lazarus-like from the darkness."

"The World has moved on. Bad times are on horseback."

"It was a blade of grass. But it was purple."

"Beyond the reach of human range, a drop of hell, a touch of strange"

"The gunslinger waited for the time of the drawing and dreamed his long dreams of the Dark Tower, to which he would someday come at dusk and approach, winding his horn, to do some unimaginable final battle."

"“Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both.” His eyes flicked over the gunslinger’s shoulder. “Fools, perchance. Let the world go before you. Let your shadow grow. Let it grow hair on its face. Let it become dark.” He smiled grotesquely. “Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter. Do you take my meaning, gunslinger?”"

"The Tower. Somewhere ahead, it waited for him—the nexus of Time, the nexus of Size."

"Hollow grandeur in place of true passions which might once have built kingdoms and sustained them."

"The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied."

"Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it."

"I don't like people, they fuck me up."

"Go then, there are other worlds than these."

"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

"The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world."

"“As far as I know, Bokononism is the only religion that has any commentary on midgets.”"

"Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way."

"Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are 'It might have been.'"

"It's all so simple, that's all. It solves so much for so many, so simply."

"“He always said he would never take his own advice, because he knew it was worthless.”"

"We do, doodley do, doodley do, doodely do, What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must; Muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, muddily do, Until we bust, bodily bust, bodily bust, bodily bust."

"I had heard it suggested one time that the seasons in the temperate zone should be six rather than four in number: summer, autumn, locking, winter, unlocking, and spring. And I remembered that as I straightened up beside our manhole, and stared and listened and sniffed. There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The earth was locked up tight. It was winter, now and forever."

"And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely. “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away."

"There was a sound like that of the gentle closing of a portal as big as the sky, the great door of heaven being closed softly. It was a grand AH-WHOOM. I opened my eyes - and all the sea was ice-nine. The moist green earth was a blue-white pearl. The sky darkened. ... [T]he sun became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel. The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes."

"This wreath I bring is a gift from the people of one country to the people of another. Never mind which countries, think of people…"

"I am about to do a very un-ambassadorial thing ... I am about to tell you what I really feel. ... We are gathered here, friends ... to honor [the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy], children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which [the Martyrs] died, my own son died. My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child. I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all same. And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind. Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. ... [I]f today is really in honor of a hundred children murdered in war ... is today a day for a thrilling show? The answer is yes, on one condition: that we, the celebrants, are working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind."

"“History,” writes Bokonon. “Read it and weep!”"

"All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies."