“He looked back at them, and Eddie saw something he had never expected to see in his life—not even if that life stretched over a thousand years. Roland of Gilead was weeping.”

“Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka.”

“Sometimes the children asked Eddie to lift them over his head, and when Eddie complied, he saw the mothers' sad smiles: He guessed it was the right lift but the wrong pair of arms.”

“Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.”

“Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life.”

“What’s that mean?” Eddie asked. “I hate it when you start up with your Zen Buddhist shit, Roland.” “It means I don’t know,” Roland said. “Who is this man Zen Buddhist? Is he wise like me?” Eddie looked at Roland for a long, long time before deciding the gunslinger was making one of his rare jokes. “Ah, get outta here...”