Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of them. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He met Tabitha Spruce in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University, where they both worked as students; they married in January of 1971. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many were gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching English at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
“Successful rebellions always begin in secret.”
“If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I’ll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming ‘Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?”
“Good luck is just bad luck with its hair combed.”
“Beyond the reach of human rage A drop of hell, a touch of strange ...”
“In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.”
“Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.”
“What if I fall?', Tim cried.Maerlyn laughed. 'Sooner or later, we all do.”
“Luck's the word those with poor hearts use for ka...”
“The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound;these are the sounds of dead voices on dead recordsfloating down the broken shaft of memory.When I turn to you to ask if you remember,When I turn to you in our bed”
“There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy——anyone who' suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I'm talking about.”
“But people love a hypocrite, you know——they recognize one of their own, and it always feels so good when someone gets caught with his pants down and his dick up and it isn't you.”
“Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son.”
“I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.”
“Io non miro con la mano; colui che mira con la mano ha dimenticato il volto di suo padre. Io miro con l’occhio.Io non sparo con la mano; colui che spara con la mano ha dimenticato il volto di suo padre. Io sparo con la mente.Io non uccido con la pistola; colui che uccide con la pistola ha dimenticato il volto di suo padre.Io uccido con il cuore.”
“I hated school. I don't trust anybody who looks back on the years from 14 to 18 with any enjoyment. If you liked being a teenager, there's something really wrong with you.”
“Bool! The end.”
“Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself.”
“Jesus watches from the wall,But his face is cold as stone,And if he loves meAs she tells meWhy do I feel so all alone?”
“These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.”
“Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.”
“I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”
“If you're going into a very dark place, then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don't want to see, why in God's name would you dare the dark at all?”
“Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.”
“I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.”
“I'm not making an enemy; I'm keepin' one.”
“Pennywise: "I'll kill you all! Ha-ha! I'll drive you crazy and then I'll kill you all! I'm every nightmare you ever had! I am your worst dream come true! I'm everything you ever were afraid of!”
“They float, they all float... and when you're down here with me, fat boy, you'll float too.”
“Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
“Sometimes a man and a woman reach a crossroads and linger there, reluctant to take either way, knowing the wrong choice will mean the end... and knowing there’s so much worth saving.”
“But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.”
“Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.”
“It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child's heart, and then his child's heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world.”
“Todos cayeron del árbol y se rompieron el brazo alguna vez, todos recuerdan lo travieso que fueron cuando eran niños, lo que no recuerdan, es a sus madres levantándose en medio de la noche para darles una aspirina”
“I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.”
“Words have weight.”
“If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.”
“Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.”
“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”
“A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.”
“It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.”
“Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that?”
“Anyway, as the old barrelhouse song says, My God, how the money rolled in. Norton must have subscribed to the old Puritan notion that the best way to figure out which folks God favours is by checking their bank acounts.”
“A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.”
“If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through that shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?”
“A person's memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It's you.”
“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”
“There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.”
“Les imbéciles sont les seuls sur terre à pouvoir absolument compter récolter ce qu'ils méritent.”
“I never think of stories as made things; I think of them as found things. As if you pull them out of the ground, and you just pick them up.”
“Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.”