Stephen King Quotes - Page 7

They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.
Stephen King
There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.
Stephen King
I started after him...and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was.""Who was it, Don?" Harold Gardner asked softly."It was Derry," Don Hagarty said. "It was this town.
Stephen King
Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka.
Stephen King
If there's to be damnation, she had said, let it be of my choosing, not theirs. He knew a little about damnation himself… and he had an idea that the lessons, far from being done, were just beginning.
Stephen King
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.
Stephen King
But in high school the business of irrevocable choices began. Doors slipped shut with a faint locking click that was only heared clearly in the dreams of later years.
Stephen King
It's in The Lord of the Rings, I think, where one of the characters says that "way leads on to way"; that you could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go . . . well, anywhere at all. It's the same way with stories. One leads to the next, to the next, and to the next; maybe they go in the direction you wanted to go, but maybe they don't. Maybe in the end it's the voice that tells the stories more than the stories themselves that matters.
Stephen King
The truth is that most writers are needy.
Stephen King
...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.
Stephen King
He sometimes believed that the compulsion to make fiction was no more than a bulwark against confusion, maybe even insanity. It was a desperate imposition of order by people able to find that precious stuff only in their minds . . . never in their hearts.
Stephen King
When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.
Stephen King
So in that sense, I and my fellow horror writers are absorbing and defusing all your fears and anxieties and insecurities and taking them upon ourselves. We’re sitting in the darkness beyond the flickering warmth of your fire, cackling into our caldrons and spitting out spider webs of words, all the time sucking the sickness from your minds and spewing it out into the night.
Stephen King
Valuables. That was a hot one, Richards thought, unbuttoning his shirt. He had an empty wallet with a few pictures of Sheila and Cathy, a receipt for a shoe sole he had replaced at the local cobbler's six months ago, a keyring with no keys on it except for the doorkey, a baby sock that he did not remember putting in there, and the package of Blams he had gotten from the machine.
Stephen King
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
Stephen King
She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.
Stephen King
He didn’t like the way things were going.There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn.
Stephen King
Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.
Stephen King
People who leave their drugs in a bathroom the guests use are just asking for trouble.
Stephen King
You can never be too thin or too rich. And if you don't believe it you were never really fat or really poor.
Stephen King
By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing 'Ave Maria'.
Stephen King
She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.
Stephen King
You have come from the shadow of the heroin and the shadow of your brother, my friend. Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare.
Stephen King
... good advice was sometimes easier to give than receive.
Stephen King
I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity.In both fiction and non-fiction, there's only one question and one answer. 'What happened?' the reader asks. 'This is what happened,' the writer responds. 'This...and this...and this, too.' Keep it simple. It's the only sure way home.
Stephen King
Close your eyes and click your heals three times...because there's no place like Dome.
Stephen King
When you’retwenty-one, life is a roadmap.It’s only when you get to betwenty-five or so that youbegin to suspect you’ve beenlooking at the map upsidedown, and not until you’reforty are you entirely sure.
Stephen King
But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.
Stephen King
She looked beautiful,standing there barefoot in her faded jeans. I wanted to take her in my arms, and lift her, and carry her into some untroubled future.Instead, I left her where she was. That's not the world we live in, she'd said, and how right she was,
Stephen King
We're not quite ending where we began, but close enough.Close enough.
Stephen King
Nothing lasts forever,' Richie repeated. He looked up at Bill, and Bill saw tears cut slowly through the dirt on Richie's cheeks.'Except maybe for love,' Ben said.'And desire,' Beverly said.
Stephen King
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
Stephen King
When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
Stephen King
What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.
Stephen King
It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.
Stephen King
Every man or woman who loves [God], they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He's apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy.
Stephen King
I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.
Stephen King
Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?She had shaken her head slowly.Men and women who can't get over their past . . . That's what ghosts are.
Stephen King
What our parents tell us when we are small seldom goes ignored, no matter how foolish it may be
Stephen King
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that's different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that's slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
Stephen King
Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.
Stephen King
At the end of almost every AA meeting, someone read the Promises. One of these was 'We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it'. Dan thought he would always regret the past, but he had quit trying to shut the door. Why bother, when it would just come open again? The fucking had no latch, let alone a lock.
Stephen King
It's best to be ruthless with the past.
Stephen King
When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.
Stephen King
The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.
Stephen King
If God gives you something you can do, why in God's name wouldn't you do it?
Stephen King
Go with your bad self.
Stephen King
I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something... set yourself on something... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies?
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.
Stephen King
A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.
Stephen King
He thought that fat boys were probably only allowed to love pretty girls inside. If he told anyone how he felt (not that he had anyone to tell), that person would probably laugh until he had a heart-attack.
Stephen King
Driving a desk was sometimes lonely, but Eddie had been in the drivers'-seat himself more than once, his aspirator riding there with him on the dashboard, its trigger reflected ghostly in the windshield (and a bucket-load of pills in the glove compartment), and he knew that real loneliness was a smeary red: the color of the taillights of the car ahead of you reflected on wet hottop in a driving rain.
Stephen King
He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.
Stephen King
Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.
Stephen King
Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.
Stephen King
His head .. it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.
Stephen King
They were with him, and for that little while the darkness was kind.
Stephen King
And as I thought about the body of Ray Brower in this light- or lack of it- what I felt was not queasiness or fear that he would suddenly appear before us, a green and gibbering banshee whose purpose was to drive us back the way we had come before we could disturb his- its- peace,but a sudden and unexpected wash of pity that he should be so alone and so defenceless in the dark that was now coming over our side of the world.
Stephen King
Jake guessed Henry had been pulling shit like this on him so long that Eddie only noticed it when Henry pulled it on someone else – someone like the blonde ticket-seller.
Stephen King
The narrator, a time traveler from 2011, scoffs at the despondency caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis -- especially the drug and alcohol use of a resident of 1962 he supposedly cares about. Then he finds his compassion because he remembers he is the exception in being able to see beyond the immediate -- and foreboding -- horizon.
Stephen King