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Stephen King

254 quotes

• “The elevator doors slid shut behind him; there was a hum as it began to go up automatically. It wouldn't come down again unless somebody else keyed it, Starkey knew; as soon as the installation's integrity had been breached, the computers had switched all the elevators to the general containment program. Why were these poor men and women lying here? Obviously they had been hoping the computers would fuck up the switch-over to the emergency procedures. Why not? It even had a certain logic to it. Everything else had fucked up.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “This is Major Alfred Nunn, United States Army. I am taking provisional and temporary control of United States forces in the San Francisco area. The handful of traitors in this HQ have been dealt with. I am in command, repeat, in command. The holding operation will go on. Deserters and defectors will be dealt with as before: extreme prejudice, repeat, extreme prejudice. I am now-" More gunfire. A scream. Background: "-them all! Get them all! Death to the war-pigs-" Heavy gunfire. Then silence on the band.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I am too old for adventure," the Judge said, putting his clippers away, "but I hope I am not too old to do what I feel is right. There is an old woman out there someplace who has probably gone to a miserable death because she felt it was right. Prompted by religious mania, I have no doubt. But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Silent white light filled the world. And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) first seen 1085 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: p. 1085

• “Frannie," he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes. "What, Stuart? " "Do you think... do you think people ever learn anything?" She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue. "I don't know," she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more, to illuminate her first response, and could only say it again: I don't know.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) first seen 1149 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: p. 1149

• “Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) first seen 1153 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: p. 1153

• “It was in the rule book. They gave you three warnings. The fourth time you fell below four miles an hour you were...well, you were out of the Walk. But if you had three warnings and could manage to walk for three hours, you were back in the sun again.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Talk had faded with the daylight. The silence that set in was oppressive. The encroaching dark, the groundmist collecting into small, curdled pools...for the first time it seemed perfectly real and totally unnatural, and he wanted either Jan or his mother, some woman, and he wondered what in the hell he was doing and how he ever could have gotten involved. He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It wasn't as bad, Garraty discovered, if you stared down at your feet as you walked and leaned forward a little. You stared strictly down at the tiny patch of pavement between your feet and it gave you the impression that you were walking on level ground. Of course, you couldn't kid yourself that your lungs and the breath in your throat weren't heating up, because they were.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Somehow the word started coming back - some people still had breath to spare, apparently. The word was this hill was a quarter of a mile long. The word was it was two miles long. The word was that no Walker had ever gotten a ticket on this hill. The word was that three boys had gotten tickets here just last year. And after that, the word stopped coming back.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Three-thirty in the morning...To Ray Garraty it seemed the longest minute of the longest night of his entire life. It was low tide, dead ebb, the time when the sea washes back, leaving slick mudflats covered with straggled weed, rusty beer cans, rotted prophylactics, broken bottles, smashed buoys, and green-mossed skeletons in tattered bathing trunks. It was dead ebb.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Daylight came creeping through a white, muted world of fog. Garraty was walking by himself again. He no longer even knew how many had bought it in the night. Five maybe. His feet had headaches. Terrible migraines. He could feel them swelling each time he put his weight on them. His buttocks hurt. His spine was icy fire. But his feet had headaches and the blood was coagulating in them and swelling them and turning the veins to al dente spaghetti.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The reason all of this is so horrible," McVries said, "is because it's just trivial. You know? We've sold ourselves and traded our souls on trivialities. Olson, he was trivial. He was magnificent, too, but those things aren't mutually exclusive. He was magnificent and trivial. Either way, or both, he died like a bug under a microscope.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “You'll know the voice when it comes. It'll tell you what to do. It told Jeremiah and Daniel and Amos and Abraham. It'll come to you. It'll tell you. And when it does, Johnny ... do your duty.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He felt as if Stillson might have taken the game of the Laughing Tiger a step further: inside the beast-skin, a man, yes. But inside the man-skin, a beast.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Well, we all do what we can, and it has to be good enough... and if it isn't good enough, it has to do.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “She stood and turned around and of course there was nothing there. But she could see him standing there, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, that easy, crooked grin on his pleasant-rather-than-handsome face, leaning lanky and at ease against a monument or one of the stone gateposts or maybe just a tree gone red with fall's dying fire.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “More and more it seemed to Ed that there was a vicious downside of American life, a greased skid of opportunism, cut corners, easy drugs, easy sex, a morality that grew cloudier each year.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But maybe there is something about what the Germans did that exercises a deadly fascination over us - something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. Maybe part of our dread and horror comes from a secret knowledge that under the right - or wrong - set of circumstances, we ourselves would be willing to build such places and staff them. Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don't you know that?” He pointed at Vern and Teddy, who were standing and waiting for us to catch up. They were laughing about something; in fact, Vern was just about busting a gut. “Your friends do. They’re like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can’t save them. You can only drown with them.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Has it ever occurred to you...that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I think that part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids...Because as soon as you have a kid, you know for sure that you're going to die. When you have a kid, you see your own gravestone.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Son, you're probably too young to look for wisdom in anyone's words but your own, but I'll tell you this: love is the enemy... Yes. The poets continually and sometimes willfully mistake love. Love is the old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a cannibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile; it is always hungry. When asked what love eats: Friendship. It eats friendship.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I wondered if Arnie was dumb enough to think that the Will Darnells of this world ever did favors out of the goodness of their hearts. I hoped he wasn't, but I wasn't sure. I wasn't sure of much about Arnie anymore. he had changed a lot in the last few weeks.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I think that everybody has a backhoe in his or her head, and at moments of stress or trouble you can fire it up and simply push everything into a great big slit-trench in the floor of your conscious mind. Get rid of it. Bury it. Except that that slit-trench goes down into the subconscious, and sometimes, in dreams, the bodies stir and walk.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It was all very well for him to tell Arnie that he knew the boy could no more commit a murder than he could walk on water. But the mind, that perverse monkey — the mind can conceive of anything and seems to take a perverse delight in doing so. Just maybe, Michael thought, lacing his hands behind his head and looking up at the dark ceiling, just maybe that's the peculiar damnation of the living. In the mind a wife can rut, laughing, with a best friend, a best friend can cast plots against you and plan backstabbings, a son can commit murder by auto.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Buddy Repperton's Camaro rammed ass-backwards into the concrete island where the gatehouse stood. The eight-inch concrete lip peeled off everything bolted to the lower deck, leaving the twisted wreckage of the straight-pipes and the muffler sitting on the snow like some weird sculpture.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He looked at me fixedly. "I'll tell you this much, Dennis. If you're lying, you don't know you are.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A secret needs two faces to bounce between; a secret needs to see itself in another pair of eyes.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Oh, about beer I never lie. A man who lies about beer makes enemies.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I don't want Church to be like all those dead pets! I don't want Church to ever be dead! He's my cat! He's not God's cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It takes the average human seven minutes to go to sleep, but according to Hand's Human Physiology, it takes the same average human fifteen to twenty minutes to wake up. It is as if sleep is a pool from which emerging is more difficult than entering. When the sleeper wakes, he or she comes up by degrees, from deep sleep to light sleep to what is sometimes called "waking sleep," a state in which the sleeper can hear sounds and will even respond to questions without being aware of it later... except perhaps as fragments of dreams.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They are secret things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets, and I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she's never really seen into any man's heart. The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis - like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock's close. A man grows what he can... and he tends it.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I'm going crazy, Louis thought wonderingly. Wheeeeee!”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Some things it don't pay to be curious about.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He could now feel his sanity beginning to give way. This was an actual sensation, a true thing. It was interesting. He imagined a tree overloaded with ice in a terrible storm would feel this way — if trees could feel anything—shortly before toppling. It was interesting... and it was sort of amusing.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What you buy is what you own, and sooner or later what you own will come back to you.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Love is like dying.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The smoking butt end of the year, November's dark iron has come to Tarker's Mills.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Three days after the ’64 earthquake in Los Angeles, a television news reporter asked a survivor who had been near the epicenter how long the quake had lasted. “It’s still going on,” the survivor said calmly.”

  Stephen King (born 1947) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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