Quotes from Stephen King

No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer.

Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it's too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It's a man's most anonymous age.

At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that's all. Sometimes they come back.

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

The world is hard and you can't have everything.

It's from Balzac. 'Behind every great fortune there is a crime.' That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.

It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough.

All your fancy ideas come down to one thing - you want to kill her by remote control , you don't want her blood on your hands. You're like a man who loves nothing better than a thick steak but wouldn't last an hour in a slaughterhouse. But listen , Paulie , and get it straight: you must face reality at this point in your life if at no other. Nothing fancy. No curlicues. Right? Right.

She pushed the button and like a miracle her head filled with the sound of Jerry Trupiano's voice… and more importantly, with the sounds of Fenway Park. She was sitting out here in the darkening, drippy woods, lost and alone, but she could hear thirty thousand people. It was a miracle.

You'll consider what you did wrong & bookend your reflections with hunger – no supper, no breakfast.

I had a moment to wonder just what he did at David Emerson's, which really was where Libertyville's elite bought. Was he a salesman? I could see him showing some smart young lady around, saying, Here's one fuck of a nice couch, ma'am, and look at this goddam settee, we sure didn't have nothing like that on Guadalcanal when those fucking stoned-out Japs came at us with their Maxwell House swords.

Her huge blue eyes and toothy red-lipsticked grin suggested a woman who might be only minutes away from a catastrophic mental breakdown.

A real drunk is only int'rested in two things: puttin paid to the jug in the hand, and huntin for the one still in the bush.

What do you read? I've never given a very satisfactory answer to that question, because it causes a kind of circuit overload in my brain. The easy answer ?Everything I can get my hands on!? is true enough, but not helpful.

The human brain is finite – no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone – but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.

She had a bottle of water in her pack—a big one with a squeeze-top—but suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.

a tall man of no age in faded, pegged jeans and a denim jacket. His pockets were stuffed with fifty different kinds of conflicting literature—pamphlets for all seasons, rhetoric for all reasons.

Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a fucking standing O, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finished reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality.

All I'm saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I'm going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you'd better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.

Don't let your good nature cloud your critical eye. The critical eye should always be cold and clear.

If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. [It is] the dubious luxury of normal men and women.

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

You're good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it is.

Roland's heart seemed to twist like a rag inside his chest, and there was a moment to wonder how it could possibly go on beating in the face of this.