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.
“Be true, be brave, standAll the rest is darkness.”
“Something in the fog!" he screamed, and Billy shrank against me-whether because of the man's bloody nose or what he was saying, I don't know. "Something in the fog took John Lee! Something-" He staggered back against a display of lawn food stacked by the window and sat down there."Something in the fog took John Lee and I heard him screaming!”
“That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.”
“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him..”
“Tell your friends I am the last of a dying race,' it said, grinning its sunken grin as it staggered and lurched down the proch steps after her. 'The only survivor of a dying planet. I have come to rob all the women...rape all the men...and learn to do the Peppermint Twist!”
“Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive. Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”
“In polite society, we call our obsessions hobbies.”
“Don't sweat the small stuff, it's a long walk back to EDEN. Carolyn Roberts”
“But let me tell you something, Harrigan - sooner or later City Hall is gonna catch up to your action, and they're gonna render unto your scofflaw holy-rollin' ass. I only hope I'm there when it happens”
“As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?”
“I don't like people. They fuck me up.”
“The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.”
“Laughter, Susannah would later reflect, is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny.”
“If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse shit.”
“The turtle couldn't help us.”
“What you don’t know, you can’t tell. Or made to tell.”
“Friends don’t spy; true friendship is about privacy, too.”
“There’s always someone who knows something.”
“A change is as good as a rest.”
“You might question a winkle - a feeling that came to you right out of the blue - but you didn’t question knowing.”
“And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.”
“Good books are for consideration after, too.”
“A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because you expect to get back more than you give.”
“Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“Time and tide wait for no man.”
“The man in black smiled. "Shall we tell the truth then, you and I? No more lies?"I thought we had been."But the man in black persisted as if Roland hadn't spoken. "Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland. Only equals speak the truth, that's my thought on't. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard. How tiresome!”
“Don't ask me silly questionsI won't play silly gamesI'm just a simple choo choo trainAnd I'll always be the same.I only want to race alongBeneath the bright blue skyAnd be a happy choo choo trainUntil the day I die.”
“Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren't prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. ”
“The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.”
“In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of quality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism. ”
“All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.”
“But it's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't or won't, it's time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.”
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
“Los Zapatos, which means "the shoes" ... was a small village not far from the ocean. It was fairly free of tourists. There was no good road, no ocean view ... and no historical points of interest. Also, the local cantina was infested with cockroaches and the only whore was a fifty-year-old grandmother. ”
“Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life's a fiction and the world's a lie, so put on some Creedence and let's get high.”
“It's alright to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.”
“See the BEAR of fearsome size!All the WORLD'S within his eyes.TIME grows thin, the past is a riddle;The TOWER awaits you in the middle.”
“Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.”
“Daj si na čas, nezlosti sa, povedz si, že to zvládneš a slová sa zvyčajne dostavia.”
“The back of the seat in front of Richards was a revelation in itself. There was a pocket with a safety handbook in it. In case of air turbulence, fasten your belt. If the cabin loses pressure, pull down the air mask directly over your head. In case of engine trouble, the stewardess will give you further instructions. In case of sudden explosive death, hope you have enough dental fillings to insure identification.”
“She suddenly realized she was sitting in an apartment by herself late at night, eating an apple and watching a movie on TV that she cared nothing about, and doing it all because it was easier than thinking, thinking was so boring really, when all you had to think about was yourself and your lost love.”
“I know that the thing under my bed doesn't exist. But I also know that if I keep my feet under the blanket, it won't grab my ankle”
“Long days and pleasant nights”
“And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.”
“Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear”
“Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can't be found.”
“We all do what we can, and it has to be good enough, and if it isn't good enough, it has to do.”
“I'm going out for a bottle of champagne. We're going to get bombed.”
“The intersection of Green and Stupid is undoubtedly an American destination, but its sad. Sad.”