Stephen King Quotes

“Please boss, don’t put that thing over my face, don’t put me in the dark. I’s afraid of the dark.”

“I’m rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I’m tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we’s comin from or goin to or why. I’m tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I’m tired of all the times I’ve wanted to help and couldn’t. I’m tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it’s the pain. There’s too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can’t.”

“Sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long.”

“I couldn’t help it. I tried to take it back, but it was too late.”

“What they were seeing was black.”

“Atonement was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed against the past. ”

“I just can’t see God putting a gift like that in the hands of a man who would kill a child.”

“The wide corridor up the center of E Block was floored with linoleum the color of tired old limes, and so what was called the Last Mile at other prisons was called the Green Mile at Cold Mountain.”

“I’m sorry for what I am.”

“On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I gonna say? That it was my job? My job?”

“Appeals weren’t for the likes of John Coffey, not back then.”

“This is the first time I ever felt really actually in danger of hell.”

“It’s strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”

“Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting.”

“To tell you the truth, boss, I don’t know much of anything.”

“Percy wanted not just to kill the mouse but to squash it.”

“He kill them with they love.”

“Do you mean to kill him, you cowards? Do you mean to kill the man who saved Melinda Moores’s life, who tried to save those little girls’ lives? Well, at least there will be one less black man in the world, won’t there? You can console yourselves with that. One less n*gger.”

“I think that’s what people most always do with the stuff they can’t make out - just forget it.”

“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.”

“Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?”

Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t. Friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of regard. How tiresome!

Where the world ends is where you must begin.

“Time’s the thief of memory.”

You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe.

Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind.

I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart.

What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?

I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye.

“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size.”

They were close to the end of the beginning.

Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity.

Long days and pleasant nights.

I don’t like people.

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

Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as equals? There is an offer you will get rarely, Roland.

“The man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”

First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.

“No man sees all ... but ... you’ll see more ... than some men see in a lifetime. ”

″ If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland ... crawling toward the Tower. ”

“May you find your Tower ... and breach it, and may you climb to the top!”

“This is your promise ... things may be different ... there may yet be rest. Even salvation. ”

“Go then, there are other worlds than these.”

“See the TURTLE of enormous girth ... On his shell he holds the earth.”

“Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world’s destruction. ”

″ Balls to your sorry ... Ka works and the world moves on. ”

“Take us back to the Path of the Beam. ... That’s our way home. ”

″ If ... we can help them, then we have to help them. That’s ... the Eld’s way.”

“There are forces at work ... not all ... are working to keep us away from the Tower. ”

“Don’t say ka, Roland. If you say ka one more time ... my head’ll explode. ”

“Ka comes to me ... I translate it ... I am not ka ... I hate it! ”

“It’s ... a job that needs to be done ... wrong cannot be allowed to stand. ”

“Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.”″

″...dead is better.”

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

“It’s like many other things in life, Ellie. You keep on the path and all’s well. You get off it and the next thing you know you’re lost if you’re not lucky.”

“By nine o’clock the movers were gone. Ellie and Gage, both exhausted. were sleeping in their new rooms, Gage in his crib, Ellie on a mattress on the floor surrounded by a foothill of boxes--her billions of Crayolas, whole broken, and blunted; her Sesame Street posters; her picture books; her clothes; heaven knew what else.”

“The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.”

“Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened.”

“Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That’s what makes them children.”

“That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe.”

“Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust... ”

“In Louis Creed’s memory that one moment always held a magical quality--partly, perhaps, because it really was magical, but mostly because the rest f the evening was so wild. In the next three hours, neither peace nor magic made an appearance.”

“Louis struggled with his temper and went silently back to the wagon. The keys were gone, but the first-aid kit was still in the glove compartment. He got it and came back. When Ellie saw it, she began to scream louder than ever.”

“I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”

“Rachel stopped crying abruptly. She sat up. “is that--” “That’s it,” Louis said. He felt apprehensive--no, he felt scared. In fact he felt terrified. He had mortgaged twelve years of their lives for this; it wouldn’t be paid off until Eileen was seventeen”

“...there is no gain without risk, perhaps no risk without love.”

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

“Louis himself felt a little like crying. A wild but not unattractive idea suddenly came to him...”

“Beyond the house was a large field for the children to play in, and beyond the field were woods that went on damn near forever.”

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, he thought, and the wind sang its bitter black song, and not so many miles distant...”

“Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there. There were a great many of them who never grew old by the fire.”

“We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.”

“Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

“Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?”

“So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

“Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room.”

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”

“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

“I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read”

“Reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light on the page and aren’t prone to spilling your coffee or cognac on the sheets. ”

“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

“That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human.”

“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.”

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side. Or you don’t.”

“And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside.”

“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”

“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.”

“A person can’t change all at once.”

“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen”

“He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.”

“You couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.”

“Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.”

“Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear.”

“Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.”

“If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.”

“Real love is silent as well as blind.”

“Above, the stars shone hard and bright, sparks struck off the dark skin of the universe.”

“She couldn’t be on his wavelength all the time. That’s all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.”

“Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up.”

“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.”

“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.”