Books were escape. Books were freedom.
I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.
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.
I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of.
So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
Doesn’t look like a monster, does he?” “They rarely do.
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.
She laughed at the stars, frightened but free, her terror as sharp as pain and as sweet as a ripe October apple.
In a terrified world, false news was king.
One of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing.
And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there’s a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down.
If you love me, then love me.
She suddenly realized she was sitting in an apartment by herself late at night, eating an apple and watching a movie on TV that she cared nothing about, and doing it all because it was easier than thinking, thinking was so boring really, when all you had to think about was yourself and your lost love.
But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.
For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable of doing it, but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels.
A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.
But who knows how long a grief may last? Isn’t it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half waken, thinking of that person with the same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled... not even in death?
The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you.
Doc,” Jack Torrance said. “Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you.” “No,” Danny said. “Oh Danny, for God’s sake – ” “No,” Danny said. He took one of his father’s bloody hands and kissed it. “It’s almost over.