Stephen King

“Eventual, as Pug used to say. When he wanted to say something was really good, he's never say it was awesome, like most people do; he'd say it was eventual. How funny is that? The old Pugmeister. I wonder how he's doing.”

“Any fool who can pucker is apt to whistle past the graveyard.”

“Garraty wondered how it would be, to lie in the biggest, dustiest library silence of all, dreaming endless, thoughtless dreams behind your gummed-down eyelids, dressed forever in your Sunday suit. No worries about money, success, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, sex, or love. Absolute zero. No father, mother, girlfriend, lover. The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth's wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.How would that be? Just how would that be?”

“When you're six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.”

“Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”

“there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.”

“A large praying mantis was performing ablutions on the springy stem of the kid's cowlick. The gunslinger snorted laughter-the first in gods knew how long-and set the fire and went after water.”

“I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss.”

“I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets! she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!”

“I am your number one fan.”

“He had been (Thinking? Praying?) It was all the same thing.”

“God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.”

“The thought process can never be complete without articulation.”

“And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside.”

“For God's sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!”

“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”

“Who gets to be best-liked in any community? Who is the most trusted? Why, the man who does the dirty job, of course, and does it with a smile. The man who does the job you couldn't bring yourself to do.”

“Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been. . . . And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip . . . at least until it proves otherwise.”

“A person can't change all at once.”

“A man who doubts himself shouldn't have to try too hard for too long, not until he's seasoned.”

“Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.”

“Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.”

“Every man or woman who loves Him, they hate Him too, because He's a hard God, a jealous God.”

“You couldn't not like someone who liked the guitar.”

“She couldn't be on his wavelength all the time. That's all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.”

“Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.”

“He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?”

“Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.”

“Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.”

“They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty.”

“oh shit it's shit”

“Christ.No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.”

“Semakin tipis bukunya, semakin sedikit omong kosongnya" -”

“If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.”

“As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mother's fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along.”

“Resurrection... ah, there's a word(that you should put right the fuck out of your mind and you know it).”

“About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.”

“A dimwit thinks nothing is funny unless it's mean.”

“I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.”

“The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.”

“When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.”

“What's been tried once had been tried once before... and before... and before...”

“And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.”

“Lover," she whispers, and closes her eyes.It falls upon her.Love is like dying.”

“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”

“Good! he wanted to cry out to her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear it!”

“Want your boat, Georgie?' Pennywise asked. 'I only repeat myself because you really do not seem that eager.' He held it up, smiling. He was wearing a baggy silk suit with great big orange buttons. A bright tie, electric-blue, flopped down his front, and on his hands were big white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.Yes, sure,' George said, looking into the stormdrain.And a balloon? I’ve got red and green and yellow and blue...'Do they float?'Float?' The clown’s grin widened. 'Oh yes, indeed they do. They float! And there’s cotton candy...'George reached.The clown seized his arm.And George saw the clown’s face change.What he saw then was terrible enough to make his worst imaginings of the thing in the cellar look like sweet dreams; what he saw destroyed his sanity in one clawing stroke.They float,' the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held George’s arm in its thick and wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea. George craned his neck away from that final blackness and began to scream into the rain, to scream mindlessly into the white autumn sky which curved above Derry on that day in the fall of 1957. His screams were shrill and piercing, and all up and down Witcham Street people came to their windows or bolted out onto their porches.They float,' it growled, 'they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too–'George's shoulder socked against the cement of the curb and Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat that day because of the flood, saw only a small boy in a yellow rain-slicker, a small boy who was screaming and writhing in the gutter with muddy water surfing over his face and making his screams sound bubbly.Everything down here floats,' that chuckling, rotten voice whispered, and suddenly there was a ripping noise and a flaring sheet of agony, and George Denbrough knew no more.Dave Gardener was the first to get there, and although he arrived only forty-five seconds after the first scream, George Denbrough was already dead. Gardener grabbed him by the back of the slicker, pulled him into the street...and began to scream himself as George's body turned over in his hands. The left side of George’s slicker was now bright red. Blood flowed into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where his left arm had been. A knob of bone, horribly bright, peeked through the torn cloth.The boy’s eyes stared up into the white sky, and as Dave staggered away toward the others already running pell-mell down the street, they began to fill with rain.”

“I still believe in the resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love;I still believe that connections between people can be made and that the spirits which inhabit us sometimes touch. I still believe that the cost of these connections is horribly, outrageously high... and I still believe that the value received far outweighs the price which must be paid. (From introductory notes.)”

“The woman had looked into the abyss and then walked out across it.”

“He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.”