Dark green mountains knuckled up in the distance. Clouds seemed to be melting on the pan of the fair blue sky. Birds flew and sang. Wasn’t it a hell of a shame, the way good country got wasted on folks.
He looked at the white pills in his hand. ‘Astin’, Eddie called it. No, that wasn’t quite right, but Roland couldn’t pronounce the word as the prisoner had said it. Medicine was what it came down to. Medicine from that other world.
He bent down until his face was before King’s face, their noses nearly touching. “This time you’ll sing until the song is done, write until the tale is done. Do you truly ken?” “‘And they lived happily ever after until the end of their days,’” King said dreamily. “I wish I could write that.” “So do I.” And he did, more than anything. Despite.
But he still lingered for a moment, as if waiting for the wind to take a hand and perhaps gust him down to his car.
Voi non me lo avete chiesto. Io non ho mai aperto bocca e voi non avete aperto la vostra. Non siamo nemmeno nello stesso anno insieme, meno che mai nella stessa stanza... eppure noi siamo insieme. Siamo vicini. Si sono incontrate le nostre menti.
None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it’s bound to remind us that there’s a devil for every god – and our devil may be closer than we like to think.
George Herbert was wrong. Living well isn’t the best revenge; loving well is.
It had been in their hands then; he was quite sure of it. But kids lose everything, kids have slippery fingers and holes in their pockets and they lose everything.
All the luck had been against them, but sooner or later even the worst luck changes.
Pity was not love, Barbie reflected... but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction.
I never trained David. I friended him.
It’s always darkest before the dawn.
Drew didn’t know where old man Prescott had gotten the small army of gun thugs he was counting on to keep that move from happening, but he was sure it would come to him eventually. Everything was eventual.
When certain seeds are planted, they nearly always grow.
The index finger was never found. Hodges thought that a seagull – one of the big boys that patrolled the lakeshore – might have seized it and carried it away. He preferred that idea to the grisly alternative: that an unhurt City Centre survivor had taken it as a souvenir.
And yes, all of a sudden she was scared. It was like a yellow thread weaving in and out of the bright red overblanket of her rage.
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas.
An accident is sometimes an unhappy woman’s best friend.
Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.
The editor is always right.” The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection.