“On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.”

“downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.”

“...it was more like bleeding than crying.”

“The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river -- it's in the pores of the place -- but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It's a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches.This is the kind of place you don't come to unless you've been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It's a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes.”

“For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.”

“The church is more than a bundle of ideals, as these younger fellows seem to believe. It’s more than a spiritual Boy Scout troop. The church is a Force … and one does not set a Force in motion lightly.”

“The smell of oil in the air was huge and furry.”