Quotes from Stephen King

Want a balloon?

Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizen should be: partisans but never zealots, respectors of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely unable to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered . . . or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

Time is a keyhole, he thought as he looked up at the stars. Yes, I think so. We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do - the wind that blows through the keyhole- is the breath of all the living universe.

She nods. 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.

I changed it. I had to. Do you know why? She studied him, her eyes grave. Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.

Because talent won't be quiet, doesn't know how to be quiet, he said. Whether it's a talent for safe-cracking, thought-reading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It'll wake you in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, 'Use me, use me, use me! I'm tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use me!

Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end.

What I'm saying is that I'm trying to find rational reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that's neveer a good sign.

You don't have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become.

Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.

The monster nevers dies.

I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.

Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.

There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.

once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual

They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.

When you want to feel better, call something a piece of shit. It usually works.

They say The Pacific has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.

I started after him...and the clown looked back. I saw Its eyes, and all at once I understood who It was. Who was it, Don? Harold Gardner asked softly. It was Derry, Don Hagarty said. It was this town.

Art should be a place of hope.

You just couldn't get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.

The wind makes you ache is some place that is deeper than your bones. It may be that it touches something old in the human soul, a chord of race memory that says Migrate or die - migrate or die.