My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, a sentiment I’ve never believed should be restricted to just writers. So-called higher thought is, by and large, highly overrated.
He would write it because the Overlook had enchanted him-could any other explanation be so simple or so true? He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
He had locked himself safely away in a place beyond pain.
There’s a wavelength, and they’re on it.
Those OxyContins he takes aren’t just pain pills, they’re stupid pills.
Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?
Might as well spit in the ocean.
The pain had driven him out of his mind. You could see it on his face. If that guy came back, he probably wouldn’t be in a saving mood. The.
Wenn man lange genug an etwas denkt, dachte ich, dann wird es Wirklichkeit.
The right to life.
Menschen, die Alibis brauchten, waren Menschen, die Geheimnisse hatten.
Footsteps approaching the door or only the heartbeat in his ears?
I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you?
What do you mean, visiting hours? Don’t talk to me about visiting hours, that’s my son!
It goes back to what I said about Andy wearing his freedom like an invisibility coat, about how he never really developed a prison mentality. His eyes never got that dull look.
It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber’s day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigarette smoke, the look of a double-edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.
Honesty’s the best policy. – Miguel de Cervantes Liars prosper. – Anonymous.
The grass in the back field was almost waist high, and now there was goldenrod, that late-summer gossip which comes to tattle on autumn every year. But there was no autumn in the air today; the sun was still all August, although calendar August was almost two weeks gone.
The body was much smaller than the heart it had held.
What was right with him he’d only give you a little at a time. What was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside.
I want to tell you something else, something I’m really starting to believe: I’m going to be okay. Not today, not tomorrow, and not next week, but eventually. As okay as we mortals are privileged to get, anyway. It’s good to know that – good to know that survival is still an option, and that sometimes it even feels good. That sometimes it actually feels like victory.