I sat there behind the wheel of my car, not sure what I should do, wishing I was someplace else, anyplace else, trying on shoes at Thom McAn’s, filling out a credit application in a discount store, standing in front of a pay toilet stall with diarrhea and no dime. Anyplace, man. It didn’t have to be Monte Carlo. Mostly I sat there wishing I was older.
Home,” Rachel said softly, still looking at the house.
If Timlin’s right, he thought, the bloodsuckers will inherit the earth instead of the meek. If they can find any blood to suck, that is.
Back then I was dropping acid regularly, and I lost all sorts of stuff. Including, for short periods, my mind.
Just thought you might like to know that there’s a little kid playing Freddy Fuckaround at the Mile 81 rest area. You know, where the Burger King used to be?
He will be with his friends, and that always feels like coming home.
Nothing was eternal, except maybe for the mind of God, and even at thirteen I had my doubts about that.
A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds – and in all of them one thing that was always the same; one unifying force that was undeniably good, even if it now happened to be imprisoned in an evil place; the Talisman, axle of all possible worlds.
He was like something out of a fairytale or a myth, the last of his breed in a world that was writing the last page of its book.
My obsession is with the macabre. I didn’t write any of the stories which follow for money, although some of them were sold to magazines before they appeared here and I never once returned a cheque uncashed. I may be obsessional but I’m not crazy. Yet I repeat: I didn’t write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not so lucky.
In Derry such forgetting of tragedy and disaster was almost an art, as Bill Denbrough would come to discover in the course of time.
The point is, sai, we’ll die down there if we’re not careful. What happened to you might look like a stroke or a heart attack to a cut-em-up man, but t’would be whatever you see down there. Anyone who doesn’t think the imagination can kill is a fool.
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Sometimes the teacher is inside us.
When you come from the city to the town you lie wakeful in the absence of noise at first. You wait for something to break it: the cough of shattering glass, the squeal of tires blistering against the pavement, perhaps a scream. But there is nothing but the unearthly hum of the telephone wires and so you wait and wait and then sleep badly. But when the town gets you, you sleep like the town and the town sleeps deep in its blood, like a bear.
Who is going to be the fish in this relationship, and who is going to be the fisherman?
The town knew about darkness. It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul. The town is an accumulation of three parts which, in sum, are greater than the sections. The town is the people who live there, the buildings which they have erected to den or do business in, and it is the land.
America has become a country full of big men in little cars.
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time... Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.
And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?
New Jersey. If there’s anyone more purely foolish than a New Yorker, it’s a fellow from New Jersey.