Stephen King

“Who is that trip-trapping upon my bridge?' Miss Davies spoke in the low, growling tones of the troll in the story. Some of the little ones covered their mouths and giggled, but most only watched her solemnly, accepting the voice of the troll as they accepted the voices of their dreams, and their grave eyes reflected the eternal fascination of the fairy tale: would the monster be bested . . . or would it feed?”

“An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it.”

“I know how bad you boys feel, but the sun will still come up tomorrow. And when it does, you 'll feel better. When the sun comes up the day after tomorrow, a little better still. This is just a part of your life, and it's over. It would have been better to win, but either way, it's over. Life will go on.”

“If you haven't considered it already, consider it now: there is every possibility that some of us, or all of us, may live and triumph, only to stand trial for murder.”

“The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned the motherfucker on.”

“She was satisfied with the answer God had given Moses from the burning bush when Moses had seen fit to question. Who are you? Mose asks, and God comes back from that bush just as pert as you like: I Am, Who I AM. In other words, Mose, stop beatin around this here bush and get your old ass in gear.”

“Oh, I suppose all men of intelligence know how fragile such things as Law and Justice and Civilization really are, but it's not a thing they think of willingly, because it disturbs one's rest and plays hob with one's appetite.”

“On the subject of love at first sight, I’m with the Beatles: I believe that it happens all the time.”

“I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something... set yourself on something... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies?”

“They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?”

“Come parole ripetute fino a quando diventano senza senso. Ripetete il vostro nome per più di duecento volte, e scoprirete che non siete nessuno.”

“Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?”

“As pessoas estão constantemente a morrer por falta de sono — dizia Wyzer — apesar de o médico legista acabar por escrever 'suicídio', em vez de 'insónia', na linha correspondente à causa da morte.”

“O sono é o herói esquecido e o curandeiro dos pobres. Shakespeare disse que se trata do fio que remenda os rasgões das preocupações (...).”

“(...) as afirmações dos cínicos parecem sempre mais plausíveis do que as dos optimistas incorrigíveis.”

“Envelhecer não é para fracos, pois não?”

“Give me what I want and I will go away”

“Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve.”

“He did it now, holding it up before his eyes as he had as a boy, and it did its old, old trick. Through the floating snow you could see a little gingerbread house with a path leading up to it. The gingerbread shutters were closed, but as an imaginative boy you could fancy that one of the shutters was being folded back (as indeed, one of them seemed to be folding back now) by a long white hand, and then a pallid face would be looking out at you, grinning with long teeth, inviting you into this house beyond the world in its slow and endless fantasy-land of false snow, where time was a myth. The face was looking out at him now, pallid and hungry, a face that would never look on daylight or blue skies again. It was his own face.He threw the paperweight into the corner and it shattered. He left without waiting to see what might leak out of it.”

“The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.”

“That above all else. They did not look out their windows. No matter what noises or dreadful possibilities, no matter how awful the unknown, there was an even worse thing: to look the Gorgon in the face.”

“Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.”

“Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and its so sad—”

“Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.”

“The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.”

“Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.”

“She was frightened because she was realizing – too late, too late – that what's done can't be undone, and what's remembered must somehow be lived with ever after. Even of the memories are insane.”

“She nods. You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.”

“It wasn't just love that held people together. There was secrets, and the price you paid to keep them.”

“I shrugged. 'Any fool can peel the Apple,' I said. 'It takes a real man to eat the core.”

“Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.”

“Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red.”

“Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full”

“Low enough to put on a tophat and crawl under a rattlesnake”

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”

“Death in the horror movies is when the monsters get you.”

“The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.”

“Now the two of them rode silently toward town, both lost in their own thoughts. Their way took them past the Delgado house. Roland looked up and saw Susan sitting in her window, a bright vision in the gray light of that fall morning. His heart leaped up and although he didn't know it then, it was how he would remember her most clearly forever after- lovely Susan, the girl in the window. So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.”

“The truth is in the details.”

“And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like.”

“Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”

“I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean...' He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. 'I mean... can't you guys just let a story be a story?”

“Hunger is the piston of art.”

“A person could see a lot without ever leaving his own living room. Especially if he had the right tools.”

“Dancing is life.”

“Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.”

“I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”

“When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.”

“Lisbon Taxi,' a woman said, 'where the mileage is always smileage. How may we help you today?”

“Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.”