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.
“Because talent won't be quiet, doesn't know how to be quiet," he said. "Whether it's a talent for safe-cracking, thought-reading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It'll wake you in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, 'Use me, use me, use me! I'm tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use me!”
“Do I know what people say? Sure. I shrug it off. what else can you do? Stop people from talking? You might as well try to stop the wind from blowing.”
“The wind moaned, a witch with cancer in her belly.”
“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”
“Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.”
“The crazy people of the world...shouldn't get to win. If God won't make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least.”
“Clay said, "If they have flashlights like us, we can almost assume-""We can't assume anything," [Alice] said restlessly, querulously. "My father says assume makes an ass out of you and me. Get it, u and-""I get it," Clay said.”
“I know your mother lives in your head - almost everyone's mother does, I guess - but you can't let her have her way on this one”
“I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why dos it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?”
“If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I'll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it's yours.”
“Do you happen to have another Condom? I think I've discovered the cure for headaches.”
“Can the future hsitory of the world be so fragile that it will not allow two high school teachers to meet and fall in love? To marry, to dance to Beatles tunes like "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and live unremarkable lives?”
“Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It's what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you're bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.”
“Whenever anything happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it.”
“She did not know if her gift came from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she didn't care which, she wad overcome with almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.”
“The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.”
“And when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.”
“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
“The silence was a comfortable one, as if they had known each other for a long time. This was a feeling about which Louis had read in books, but which he had never experienced until now.”
“Their faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with bland fire.”
“Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor”
“Many already leaving Sobriety City on the Alcohol Express”
“Like the man said, a little hope never hurt anybody”
“Dead was the gift that kept on giving. Dead, likediamonds, was forever.”
“Kennedy entered, waving to the standing audience, an elderly gentleman in an Alpine hat and lederhosen struck up “Hail to the Chief ” on an accordion bigger than he was. The president did a double take, then lifted both hands in an amiable holy shit gesture. For the first time I saw him as I had come to see Oswald—as an actual man. In the double take and the gesture that followed it, I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.”
“The most classic horror tale of this latter type is the Old Testament story of Job, who becomes human Astro-Turf in a kind of spiritual Superbowl between God and Satan.”
“When Annie's treatin, you best be eatin.”
“Chains (other than the ones we all learned to make out of strips of colored paper in kindergarten I suppose) are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous prisoners.”
“By the time he was done with the deer it had been dark three hours and his bad leg was singing 'Ave Maria'.”
“Explanations are such cheap poetry.”
“Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase the other, if you please.”
“Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.”
“You needn't die happy when your time comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from the beginning to the end and ka is always served.”
“Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a thousand years.”
“Writing fiction for money is a mug's game.”
“Time, Eddie had decided during this period, was in large part created by external events. When a lot of interesting shit was happening, time seemed to go by fast. If you got stuck with nothing but the usual boring shit, it slowed down. And when everything stopped happening, time apparently quit altogether. Just packed up and went to Coney Island. Weird but true.”
“The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.”
“Dreams on waking were like empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems.”
“All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.”
“I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don't mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good ... something that was good but still a secret.”
“It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.”
“The only wat to get better at writing is to write. And read.”
“Every marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark”
“She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten”
“Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants even after your pants were gone”
“We don't know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.”
“Dreams age faster than dreamers.”
“Her hands were to her face but she could see through the prison of her fingers could see them how they were beautiful wrapped in light swathed in the bright angelic robes of Acceptance”
“Tanto vale bersi l'oceano con un cucchiaino piuttosto che discutere con un innamorato.”
“we need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”