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.
“A person who doesn't learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.”
“Life turns on a dime.”
“Think what you will, blackbird, for I'll be here long after thee's gone they course and died thy death.”
“Women are better at keeping secrets, but men are more comfortable with them”
“Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent.”
“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”
“If you're going into a dark place... 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?”
“The Tower. He would come to the Dark Tower and there he would sing their names; there he would sing their names; there he would sing all their names. The sun stained the east a dusky rose, and at last Roland, no longer the last gunslinger but one of the last three, slept and dreamed his angry dreams through which there ran only that one soothing blue thread: There I will sing all their names!”
“Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter.”
“No hago más que percibirle... sentirle... en todos los rincones.”
“¿Por qué?. ¿Por qué había podido ocurrir algo así?. ¿Cómo habían podido confabularse tantos acontecimientos juntos?.”
“Donna tuvo la sensación de que ambos habían llegado a conocerse íntimamente y que no podría haber descanso ni término para ninguno de los dos hasta que hubieran explorado aquella terrible relación y hubieran llegado a una conclusión definitiva.”
“Había tenido ocasión de echar una buena mirada a su vida y había visto que todo había sido un decorado teatral y falsas apariencias.”
“En la oscuridad no parecía importar que casi todas las respuestas fueran absurdas.”
“Todo el espectro del mundo auditivo era suyo. Oía las campanadas del cielo y los ásperos gritos que surgían del infierno. En su locura, oía lo real y lo irreal.”
“Rostros. Voces. Habitaciones. Escenas. Libros. El terror de este momento, pensando VOY A MORIR...”
“Tiempo, pensó. Tiempo y perspectiva. Hay que darle eso. Si le obligas, le perderás con toda seguridad.”
“Él le había hecho daño, le había hecho mucho daño, y el mundo era un terrible embrollo de sensaciones e impresiones...”
“Una absurda palabra antigua acudió a su mente. Burlado, pensó. He sido burlado.”
“¿Por qué no podía enfadarse? ¿Por qué tenía que estar tan cochinamente asustado?”
“Trató de pensar con coherencia ysimplemente no pudohacerlo.”
“Aspiraba el olor de la locura en un viento que aún no había llegado.”
“El monstruo nunca muere.”
“¡Te voy a matar! Y, te lo aseguro, si Dios me lo permite, te mataré dos veces.”
“Si está en San Francisco la seguiré allí. Si está en Tokyo la seguiré allí. Y si está en el infierno la seguiré allí. ¿Por qué no?. Allí es donde acabaremos de todas formas y probablemente juntos.”
“No conseguiría zafarse del terror que se había apoderado de su corazón. Tendría que aprender a aceptarlo.”
“Here is another one ready to die for you, Roland. What great wrong did you ever do that you should inspire such terrible loyalty in so many?”
“Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful”
“In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable... There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts... If I ever give you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.”
“Panic is highly contagious, especially in situations when nothing is known and everything is in flux.”
“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”
“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
“And didn't they say that, although curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought the beast back?”
“Churchbells were calling the faithful to worship, and outside it was a beautiful day”
“...maybe the world needs a cadre of smartasses to liven things up, who knows?”
“It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.”
“Beating heroin is child's play compared to beating your childhood.”
“downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.”
“I'm the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.”
“Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.”
“These things were...well...they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action.”
“I hope.”
“So what he supposed to do? Grab Bobbie's ax and make like Jack Nicholson in The Shinning? He could see it. Smash, crash, bash: Heeeeeeere's GARDENER!”
“Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.”
“Far away, through the gash that led the way into the mountains, he heard the thick mouth of the perpetual thunder.”
“The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing.”
“Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.”
“The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it, as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.”
“The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of one who sees but does not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious.”
“she might have been pretty when she started out, but the world had moved on since then.”