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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.


“sometimes an accident can be an unhappy womans best friend ”
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“Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.”
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“Pam's father had been diagnosed with rectal cancer. It didn't surprise me. Put a bunch of white assholes together and you're going to find that going around.”
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“Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”
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“You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you.”
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“Humor is almost always anger with its make-up on.”
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“That's clear about the end of my other life, how I kept saying 'I can do this' even when I knew I couldn't, even when I knew I was fucked, I was dead ass fucked in the pouring rain. ”
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“no knowledge obtained without risk”
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“Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
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“Wow. This makes grand central look like a bus stop in Buttfuck Nebraska.”
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“A tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid. Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.”
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“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead”
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“Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?”
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“Thunderheads were pouring toward them through the ragged teeth of the White Mountains, and Lisey counted seven dark spots where the high slopes had been smudged away by cauls of rain. Brilliant lightnings flashed inside those stormbags and between those two of them, connecting them like some fantastic fairy bridge, was a double rainbow that arched over Mount Cranmore in a frayed loophole of blue.”
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“And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.”
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“And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. The light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus... And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.”
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“There are great drifting theatre curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn't it exactly. She thinks no one has ever named the shade she's seeing.”
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“The sunlight pouring in the east window came through her lids and made a dark red beet soup that moved with the rhythm of her heart...”
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“Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?”
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“Without story books is like a person with no soul.”
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“I do have one slightly crooked wheel upstairs, but everything else is ticking along just four-o, thank you very much.”
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“Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.”
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“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud. ”
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“It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.”
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“Fault always lies in the same place: with him weak enough to lay blame.”
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“It is the tale, not he who tells it.”
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“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
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“All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one...”
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“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”
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“you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
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“Hapscomb's Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston.”
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“This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six!"[...]"Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four!"[...]"Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!"[...]"Six!' the phone screamed. 'Six, this is six, this is goddam fucking SIX!”
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“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.I aim with my eye.I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.I shoot with my mind.I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.I kill with my heart.”
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“In many interviews he had identified himself as a man outraged by death, but that was pretty much the same old big-balls crap he'd been selling throughout his career. He was terrified of death, that was the truth, and as a result of spending his life honing his imagination, he could see it coming from at least four dozen different directions... and late at night when he couldn't sleep, he was apt to see it coming from four dozen different directions at once. Refusing to see the doctor, to have a checkup and let them peek under the hood, would not cause any of those diseases to pause in their approach or their feeding upon him--if, indeed, the feeding had already begun--but if he stayed away from the doctors and their devilish machines, he wouldn't have to know. You didn't have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if you never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing. And what no doctor in the world seemed to know was that, for men like Johnny Marinville, fearing was sometimes better than finding. Especially when you'd put out the welcome mat for every disease going.”
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“You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?”
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“thoes prepared to shed copious floods of crocodile tears . . .”
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“Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.”
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“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
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“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
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“Invitation to Dance-It’s a Dance. And sometimes they turn the lights off in this ballroom.But we’ll dance anyway, you and I. Even in the Dark. Especially in the Dark.May I have the pleasure?”
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“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
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“Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
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“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 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.”
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“When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, There's just something about you that pisses me off.”
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“Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.”
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“The smell of oil in the air was huge and furry.”
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“The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.”
Stephen King
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“the look of the sky as the day's blue blood runs out of its cheek.”
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“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
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“He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed, filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever.”
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