Stephen King Quotes - Page 10

Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.
Stephen King
In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next.
Stephen King
Bad news should always come after lunch.. first thing in the morning everything left a bruise.
Stephen King
Oddly, the burned hand didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.
Stephen King
A hurt body and mind aren’t just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away.
Stephen King
Pain rises. From the heart to the head pain rises.
Stephen King
I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life...It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. 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.
Stephen King
There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy——anyone who' suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about.
Stephen King
The shuddering would not stop. The pain was like the end of the world. He thought: There comes a point when the very discussion of pain becomes redundant. No one knows there is pain the size of this in the world. No one. It is like being possessed by demons.
Stephen King
It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed -- not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.
Stephen King
Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years.
Stephen King
Shall I tell you what sociology teaches us about the human race? I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society”. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Stephen King
and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended
Stephen King
The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague--the black death--decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu--it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it?--that no one but the historians seem to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.
Stephen King
In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable... There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts... If I ever give you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.
Stephen King
In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable... There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts... If I ever give you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.
Stephen King
...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...
Stephen King
Obliqueness is the curse of the reading class.
Stephen King
Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.
Stephen King
How to Draw a Picture (XII)Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.
Stephen King
The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.
Stephen King
Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.Art consists of the persistence of memory.
Stephen King
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
Stephen King
Isn't bravery always sort of beautiful?
Stephen King
the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood ...
Stephen King
You know, small children take it as a matter of course that things will change every day and grown-ups understand that things change sooner or later and their job is to keep them from changing as long as possible. It’s only kids in high school who are convinced they’re never going to change. There’s always going to be a pep rally and there’s always going to be a spectator bus, somewhere out there in their future.
Stephen King
A change is as good as a rest.
Stephen King
I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
Stephen King
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.Or you don't.
Stephen King
Thank you, Men, for the railroads. Thank you, Men, for inventing the automobile and killing the red Indians who thought it might be nice to hold on to America for a while longer, since they were here first. Thank you, Men, for the hospitals, the police, the schools. Now I'd like to vote, please, and have the right to set my own course and make my own destiny. Ince I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying. Thank you, Men.
Stephen King
Your man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women,´Roland said. ´Was He ever married?´The corners of Callahan's mouth quirked. ´No´ he said, ´but His girlfriend was a whore.´´Well,´ Roland said, ´that's a start.´
Stephen King
She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.
Stephen King
The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it's only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don't love you, but your momma does and so do I.
Stephen King
A mob always picked its own leaders, and it always picked the right ones.
Stephen King
Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.
Stephen King
Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.
Stephen King
And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.
Stephen King
He was a poet who sometimes taught Free University classes or travelled in the western states of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, speaking to high school English classes, stunning middle-class boys and girls (he hoped) with the news that poetry was alive—narcoleptic, to be sure, but still possessed of a certain hideous vitality.
Stephen King
For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sunblock is to the skin during the heat of the summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smart-ass psychologist will question your ability to even do that.
Stephen King
Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don't make any conscious effort to improve it... One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your shot ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of pre-meditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you'll never use 'emolument' when you mean 'tip' and you'll never say 'John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion' when you mean 'John stopped long enough to take a shit'. If you believe 'take a shit' would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say 'John stopped long enough to move his bowels'...
Stephen King
Mr Gray didn't care much for Jonesy's body (or so he told himself; in truth it was hard not to feel at least some affection for something capable of providing such unexpected pleasures as 'bacon' and 'murder'), but it did have to take him another couple of hundred miles.
Stephen King
Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts.
Stephen King
He’s my cat! He’s not God’s cat! Let God have his own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!
Stephen King
Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild.
Stephen King
In here I'm the guy who can get things for you... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it.
Stephen King
Dreams are a simple psychological emetic, and people who have them are more blessed than cursed
Stephen King
In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.
Stephen King
I think that, even if we forget each other, we'll remember in our dreams.
Stephen King
Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.
Stephen King
Come on, Doctor... we got places to go.
Stephen King
The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.
Stephen King
You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.
Stephen King
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn't it?
Stephen King
And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you'll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes' worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.
Stephen King
... it would matter ... to the tens of thousands of young Americans ... who would ... be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.
Stephen King
Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...
Stephen King
Fighting for peace, is like f***ing for chastity
Stephen King
Was there even such a thing as normall? People had terrible things behing their faces sometimes. He knew that now.
Stephen King
Do you think... do you think people ever learn anything?
Stephen King
People are only rational on the surface.
Stephen King