Quotes from Stephen King

I was just following orders. The people elected me. But who elected the people?

In the end, it's the bitches of the world who abide . . . and as for the dust bunnies: frig ya!

I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world," Mrs. Shoplaw said. "Religion is supposed to comfort.

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.

What does a good man fall back on when the situation is desperate? His faith, of course. The science of a new century. The love of his friends.

Never had he seen a man who looked so lonely, so far from the run of human life with its fellowship and warmth. To see him here, in this place of fiesta, only underlined the truth of him: he was the last. There was no other.

La ficción es la verdad que se encuentra dentro de la mentira y la verdad de esta ficción es muy sencilla: La magia existe.

If it's all true, then we're in the citadel of unbelief, where nightmares are dispatched with Lysol and scalpels and chemotherapy rather than with stakes and Bibles and wild mountain thyme.

It always seems to be cool in the houses of old people, have you noticed?

She was just a year old, but she had wanted me to stay longer. That's how you know you're home, I think, no matter how far you've gone from it or how long you've been in some other place. Home is where they want you to stay longer.

That John Coffey whose eyes were always streaming tears, like blood from a wound that can never heal.

Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That's all history is, after all: scar tissue.

Go with your bad self.

The spectacular incident of the stones serves as a kind of red herring in this respect. Many researchers have adopted the erroneous belief that where there has been one incident, there must be others. To offer another analogy, this is like dispatching a crew of meteor watchers to Crater National Park because a huge asteroid struck there two million years ago.

Time is invisible. Unlike weight. Ah, but maybe that wasn't true. You could feel weight, yes--when you were carrying too much, it made you ploddy--but wasn't it, like time, basically just a human construct? Hands on a clock, numbers on a bathroom scale, weren't they only ways of trying to measure invisible forces that had visible effects? A feeble effort to corral some greater reality beyond what mere humans thought of as reality?

It's just that I was thinking you don't ride in that truck of yours, you wear it.

You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.

I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I'd had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality is thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

Ree was okay, but she was like a toddler, how silence made her anxious. Ree was in for credit fraud, forgery, and drug possession with intent to sell.

Take your time. Get serene.

Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is the more things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation.

How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don't know any more than a rat in a trap—a rat with a broken back that thinks it still wants to live.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.