Quotes from Stephen King

The strings that bind you tight to the map of your life

In America, where surface has always passed for substance, people always believe guys like Frank Dunning.

Those in the grip of a strong drug - heroin, devil grass, true love - often find themselves trying to maintain a precarious balance between secrecy and ecstasy as they walk the tightrope of their lives. Keeping one's balance on a tightrope is difficult under the soberest of circumstances; doing so while in a state of delirium is all but impossible.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

Or maybe it wasn't a man at all.

The world has given me a good life since then, I won't deny it, but sometimes I hate the world, anyway. Dick Cheney, that apologist for water boarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever it Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this - how about that? He lives on; other people have died.

Dark, don't catch me here.

But fascination is fear's twin brother

This happened in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it's a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or—quite likely—die when there's no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot

Healing is a kind of revolt...all successful revolts begin in secret.

the most basic rule of human discourse: when someone says they're going to be honest with you, they are in most cases preparing to lie faster than a horse can trot.

El dinero compra muchas cosas, pero no puede parar el rayo.

A woman's love is strange and cruel and nearly always clear-sighted, love that sees is always horrible love, and she knew walking away was right and so she walked, dismissing the cries as only another part of the boy's development, like smiles from gas or scraped knees.

His relationship with his father had been like the unfurling of some flower of beautiful potential, which, when wholly opened, turned out to be blighted inside.

We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy.

And no matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously, I can't lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.

Because when Eddie's in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.

Free, free, free... necromancer, I love you.

At nineteen they can card you in the bars and tell you to get the fuck out, put your sorry act (and sorrier ass) back on the street, but they can't card you when you sit down to paint a picture, write a poem, or tell a story.

but what I mean is she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?" "It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all.

The truth has to come out, that's the basis of art. But that's not to say the world must see it. Be brave. Don't be afraid to draw the secret things. No one said art was always a zephyr; sometimes it's a hurricane. Even then you must not hesitate or change course. Because if you tell yourself the great lie of bad art - that you are in charge - your chance of the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.

Did you know that you could sit in front of a screen or a pad of paper and change the world? It doesn't last, the world always comes back, but before it does, it's awesome. It's everything.

You're smiling again," Regina said. "I was just thinking about how much I love you both," Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and touched; there was a soft gleam in his mother's eyes that might have been tears. They really believed it. The shitters. •