Stephen King Quotes - Page 9

Get busy living or get busy dying.”― Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption
Stephen King
I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don't we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
Stephen King
It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living, or get busy dying.
Stephen King
Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can't be found.
Stephen King
She looks like the type that might freak out. It's something in the eyes, Frannie. It says if you shoot my sacred cows, I'll shoot yours.
Stephen King
A man who doubts himself shouldn't have to try too hard for too long, not until he's seasoned.
Stephen King
A person can't change all at once.
Stephen King
Don't think I know you," Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry's hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can't afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can't afford the zoo, go see a politician.
Stephen King
Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.
Stephen King
We'll just have to get along. That's what people do, you know? They just get along. And try to help each other.
Stephen King
Show me a man or a 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
Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.
Stephen King
It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut—it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.
Stephen King
...and still the hands did their trick, like over-eager dogs that want to do their rolling—over trick for you not once or twice but all night.
Stephen King
The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed
Stephen King
There was nothing … and nothing … and then the car bumped up again. There was a muffled pop, the sound of a small pumpkin exploding in a microwave oven.Morris cut the wheel to the left and there was another bump as the Biscayne went back into the parking area. He looked in the mirror and saw that Curtis’s head was gone.
Stephen King
The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.
Stephen King
Fiction is the truth inside a lie.
Stephen King
A few of the gunslingers dance, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light.
Stephen King
I have seen many cases like N. during the five years I've been in practice. I sometimes picture these unfortunates as men and women being pecked to death by predatory birds. The birds are invisible - at least until a psychiatrist who is good, or lucky, or both, sprays them with his version of Luminol and shines the right light on them - but they are nevertheless very real. The wonder is that so many OCDs manage to live productive lives, just the same. They work, they eat (often not enough or too much, it's true), they go to movies, they make love to their girlfriends and boyfriends, their wives and husbands . . . and all the time those birds are there, clinging to them and pecking away little bits of flesh.
Stephen King
Censorship and the suppression of reading materials are rarely about family values and almost always about controlabout who issnapping the whip, who is saying no, and who is saying go. Censorship's bottom line is this: if the novel Christine offends me, I don't want just to make sure it's kept from my kid; I want to make sure it's kept from your kid, as well, and all the kids. This bit of intellectual arrogance, undemocratic and as old as time, is best expressed this way: "If it's bad for me and my family, it's bad for everyone's family."Yet when books are run out of school classrooms and even outof school libraries as a result of this idea, I'm never much disturbed not as a citizen, not as a writer, not even as a schoolteacher . . . which I used to be. What I tell kids is, Don't get mad, get even. Don't spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don't walk, to the nearest nonschool library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know.
Stephen King
If there are ten thousand medieval peasants who create vampires by believing them real, there may be one–probably a child–who will imagine the stake necessary to kill it. But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.
Stephen King
Schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.
Stephen King
Then, for no reason I could tell you, I tossed the spool again, even though Elaine had asked me not to. Maybe only because, in a way, him chasing a spool was like old people having their slow and careful version of sex - you might not want to watch it , you who are young and convinced that, when it comes to old age, an exception will be made in your case, but they still want to do it.
Stephen King
When it comes to sex, no pairing is beyond belief.
Stephen King
What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.
Stephen King
Cat can have kittens in the oven, girl, but that won’t ever make em muffins.
Stephen King
...there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb.
Stephen King
When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing-
Stephen King
I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I'd had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality is thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.
Stephen King
Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn't. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake.
Stephen King
The memories: they are the reality.
Stephen King
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 that 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
For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.
Stephen King
What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone.
Stephen King
[L]ife is more than just steering a course around pain.
Stephen King
Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.
Stephen King
Paths cross all the time in this world of our, sometimes in the strangest places.
Stephen King
You haven't finished the key, but not because you are afraid to finish. You're afraid of finding you can't finish. You're afraid to go down to where the stones stand, but not because you're afraid of what may come once you enter the circle. You're afraid of what may not come. You're not afraid of the great world, Eddie, but of the small one inside yourself.
Stephen King
Pain is the biggest power of love." That's what Wireman says.
Stephen King
and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure.
Stephen King
The exhausted mind is obsession's easiest prey.
Stephen King
I will scream as the sanity leaves my mind forever. I will scream...but there is no one there to hear me.
Stephen King
But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty." McVries's voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. "It isn’t man or God. It’s something...in the brain.
Stephen King
It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.
Stephen King
The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.
Stephen King
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows
Stephen King
Home is where they want you to stay longer
Stephen King
A successful marriage was a balancing act-that was a thing everyone knew. A successful marriage was also dependent on a high tolerance for irritation.
Stephen King
By definition, though, we are family. And in difficult times-- times like these-- despite our differences, we stand together as family.
Stephen King
But it is. It’s something you need, and that’s a long way from nothing. If you need it, Eddie, we need it. What we don’t need is a man who can’t let go of the useless baggage of his memories.
Stephen King
One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Christ Himself could only find twelve.
Stephen King
Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.― Stephen King, The Shining
Stephen King
Lend me your wings, bird. I'll spread them and fly on the thermals.
Stephen King
A bad song for a night such as this, mayhap, but her heart went its own way without much interest in what her head thought or wanted; always had.
Stephen King
A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can't take care of it is a fool. You don't hate him, but you got to pity him.
Stephen King
You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.
Stephen King
In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, but most of them are either divorced or queer. It's silence that is a marriage's best friend.
Stephen King
when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.
Stephen King
It's worked! Our marriage has outlasted all of the world leaders, except for Castro. And if we keep talking, arguing, making love and dancing to the Ramones- it'll probably keep working.
Stephen King