The Stand Quotes

“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.”