She was a Florida snowbird archetype, about eighty, permed to perfection, and as darkly tanned as a cordovan shoe. She looked at me, looked away, then did a double take. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Stephen King. You write those scary stories. That’s all right, some people like them, but not me. I like uplifting stories, like that Shawshank Redemption.” “I wrote that too,” I said. “No you didn’t,” she said, and went on her way.
A charming eccentric, a piece of blank paper on which the electorate could write its message: You other guys are so wasted that we decided to elect this fool for two years instead.
Is there a status quo in the house?
The door banged open, letting in a raucous flood of the Oak Ridge Boys.
He was, of course, a demon incarnate – or the shadow of a god. They called him Mir, which to these people meant ’the world beneath the world.
Arr, reality’s a dirty place with no religion in it.
But even the craziest idea can work its way into your mind if you’re lonely and grief-stricken and someone keeps harping on it. It can wriggle in there like a bloodworm, and lay its eggs, and pretty soon your whole brain is squirming with maggots. I.
Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That’s the first important thing I ever found out I didn’t find out from my mother.
She didn’t believe Scott had exactly planned all this; he didn’t even plan his books, as complex as some of them were. Plotting them, he said, would take out all the fun.
Sometimes he thought of a saying Nora had brought home from her AA meetings: the past is history, the future’s a mystery.
There is a core simplicity to the English language and its American variant, but it’s a slippery core.
Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Dorothy,’ Eddie said. ‘You ain’t in Kansas anymore.
All I can do is say again what I’ve said already: when one isn’t sure about ka, it’s best to let ka work itself out. If one meddles, one almost always does the wrong thing.
Lovecraft was an atheist. Edgar Allan Poe was sort of a half-assed transcendentalist. And Hawthorne was only conventionally religious.
To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something akin to that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car.
I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers – one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans – but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.
We’ll eat your steam and lap up your blood. But first, we’ll drink your screams.
Muh-muh-maybe, ” Bill said, and he felt a sudden helpless fury at his stutter, which made it impossible for him to talk fast. Perhaps they were things he would have found impossible to say anyway – how he felt he could almost see through Henry Bowers’s eyes, how he felt that, although on opposite sides, pawns controlled by opposing forces, he and Henry had grown very close. Henry expected.
God’s grace is a pretty cool concept. It stays intact every time it’s not you.
But that’s enough. Fun is fun and done is done. Turn out their lights, beautiful.