Er ist wie eine Katze, hatte sie gesagt. Ein gemeiner alter Kater. Er wird versuchen, dich zur Maus zu machen.
Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?” “I guess that’s close enough,” Susannah said. “Does no one eat stew?” Roland asked. “Sometimes at supper, I guess,” Eddie said, “but when it comes to entertainment, we do tend to stick with one flavor at a time, and don’t let any one thing touch another thing on your plate. Although it sounds kinda boring when you put it that way.
Don’t make me check the card catalogue.
When they got here It would cast them, shrieking and insane, into the deadlights.
Buchenwald and Dachau had knocked him crooked, and he’d never been really straight afterward. Yet he had done his best in small ways – volunteering in the city’s soup kitchen, working with kids from homes that were poor, broken, or both – to straighten some things. He still thought things like that mattered; even two bits in a bum’s upturned hat mattered.
Hallorann’s testicles turned into two small wrinkled sacs filled with shaved ice.
If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.
Jesus Pumpkin-Pie Christ, don’t you get it? You’re killing each other over a piece of music that was never even released as a single!
But these lands, though poisoned, were not entirely dead.
In a weird way it was just too good to put down. It was like a novel so disgusting you just have to finish it.
I asked him. “ ‘I’m telling you that you aren’t shooting blanks and haven’t been for quite awhile now, ’ he said. ‘Millions of little wigglies in your sperm sample. Your days of going gaily in bareback with no questions asked have temporarily come to an.
When you write a story, you are telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story... Your stuff starts out being just for you... but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right, as right as you can... it belongs to anyone who wants to read it, or criticise it.
Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence.
That’s a big room up there, and a .38 doesn’t have much accuracy from a distance.
Bill’s voice floated up: “Y-You c-c-can stay up th-there if you w-want, Ruh-Ruh-Richie. St-Stand g-g-guard.
I didn’t want salvation. I was either past that point or never reached it.
When is a Beryl not a Beryl? ‘When it’s a Claudia,’ he said.
The most enthusiastic tellers of these tales, he came to realize, were men who wouldn’t be dragged into the Falcon with a chainfall for fear all the muscles would go out of their wrists, or something. Yet they seemed privy to all sorts of information.
Then hear this, and never forget it. Any fool with fast hands can take a tiger by the balls, but it takes a hero to keep on squeezing.
Could he hold up a hand, tell them he had spent a thousand years learning this trick and others, tell them of the guns and the blood that had blessed them? Not with his mouth. But his hands could speak their own tale.