Stephen King Quotes - Page 5

The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
Stephen King
When one has little faith, one must survive from day to day signs-
Stephen King
Most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.
Stephen King
there's no harm in hoping for the best as long as you're prepared for the worst.
Stephen King
I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: "If I sit down and do this, everything will come out OK.
Stephen King
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
Stephen King
There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.
Stephen King
And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.
Stephen King
When it was done and I went to sleep, I lay awake and listened to the clock on your nightstand and the wind outside and understood that I was really home, that in bed with you was home, and something that had been getting close in the dark was suddenly gone. It could not stay. It had been banished. It knew how to come back, I was sure of that, but it could not stay and I could really go to sleep. My heart cracked with gratitude. I think it was the first gratitude I’ve ever really known. I lay there beside you and the tears rolled down the sides of my face and onto the pillow. I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between. I don’t care if you understand me. Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety. I’ve never forgotten how safe I felt with that thing gone out of the darkness.
Stephen King
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
Stephen King
...it was amazing, wasn't it, how bad you could hurt when there was nothing physically wrong.
Stephen King
Sometimes the only thing to do is to take the thing that you must have. Even if someone gets hurt.
Stephen King
If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit
Stephen King
Be sure your sin will find you out...Be sure.
Stephen King
It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.
Stephen King
Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful
Stephen King
A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.
Stephen King
But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn't understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard.
Stephen King
The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you make a pleasing sound. A harmonic.
Stephen King
...most of what bein human's about is making choices and payin the bills when they come due. Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don't give a person leave to just walk away from em... In a case like that, you just have to make the best choice you can n then pay the price.
Stephen King
In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don't life or approve of.
Stephen King
I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character study; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.
Stephen King
I'm not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.
Stephen King
...there are worse things than losing the girl.
Stephen King
Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.
Stephen King
Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.
Stephen King
What are you?''I'm the Turtle, son. I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it; I had a bellyache.
Stephen King
Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.
Stephen King
It would not do to tell other people, not just because they wouldn't believe but because they wouldn't care.
Stephen King
The silence wasn't uncomfortable or hostile but exhausted--the quiet of people who have a great deal to think about but not a hell of a lot to say.
Stephen King
The world has given me a good life since then, I won't deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever it Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this - how about that? He lives on; other people have died.
Stephen King
I love you too much to lie to you, Lisey. I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it's the only kind I have to give. I think we're going to be quite a wealthy couple in terms of money, but I'll almost certainly be an emotional pauper all my life. I've got the money coming, but as for the rest I've got just enough for you, and I won't ever dirty or dilute it with lies. Not with the words I say, not with the ones I hold back.
Stephen King
That— we seemed to have decided without saying a word— might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy.
Stephen King
Black as night and as beautiful as forever.
Stephen King
You must be human . . . how weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse.
Stephen King
You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.
Stephen King
Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.
Stephen King
The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.
Stephen King
Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous.
Stephen King
No, honey. Maybe you can put the things from the Overlook away in lockboxes, but not memories. Never those. They’re the real ghosts.
Stephen King
Such grave matters as sin and forgiveness should remain between man and God
Stephen King
...we know there's a third choice. An alternative to staying simon-pure or bathing in the filth and the slime. It's the alternative that grown-ups all over the world pick. You balance off your walk through the hog-wallow against what it gains you. You choose the lesser of two evils and try to keep your good intentions on front of you. And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night...and what your dreams are like.
Stephen King
People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.
Stephen King
He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That’s the solution.
Stephen King
The thought process can never be complete without articulation.
Stephen King
He removed his unvaluable valuables and dumped his shirt, pants, and skivvies into a letter slot.
Stephen King
The trap had a ghastly perfection
Stephen King
The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it.
Stephen King
He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.
Stephen King
Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.
Stephen King
There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.
Stephen King
the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.
Stephen King
They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.
Stephen King
They were close to the end of the beginning . . .
Stephen King
Once again there was the desert, and that only.
Stephen King
Feelings are invulnerable to rational thought.
Stephen King
He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn't.
Stephen King
God, you had enough time to have been through it three times. You've been through my stuff. I bet you over and let one of you stick the world's longest finger up my ass. If a prostate check is an exam, that was a motherfucking safari. I was scared to look down. I thought I'd see that guy's finger nail sticking out of my cock.
Stephen King
Good! he wanted to cry out to her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear it!
Stephen King
Some werewolves are hairy on the inside.
Stephen King