Stephen Edwin King
Stephen King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. (Stephen King Quotes)
“95% of the people who walk the earth are inert, Johnny. 1% are saints, and 1% are assholes. The other 3% do what they say they can do.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“A charming eccentric, a piece of blank paper on which the electorate could write its message: You other guys are so wasted that we decided to elect this fool for two years instead.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“A child blind from birth doesn’t even know he’s blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”
Stephen King
It
“A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“A kid of your age—any kid—could get hold of matches if she wanted to, burn up the house or whatever. But not many do. Why would they want to?”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“A life without love is like a tree without fruit.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“A lot of folks, they got a little bit of shine to them. They don’t even know it. But they always seem to show up with flowers when their wives are feelin blue with the monthlies, they do good on school tests they don’t even study for, they got a good idea how people are feelin as soon as they walk into a room.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“A lot,’ he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes again. ‘A damn lot, that’s what I think.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“A man who lies about beer makes enemies”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God’s creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don’t know how poorly off they are.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“A minute can be an awful short space of time under some circumstances, but it can be an awful long one at a time like that.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“A person can go along quite awhile if they get a good day every once and again.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“A person can’t change all at once.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“A person sometimes believes she’s seen all the way to the bottom of the well of human stupidity, and a reminder that that well apparently has no bottom is sometimes useful.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“A person who doesn’t learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“A person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds—and in all of them one thing that was always the same; one unifying force that was undeniably good, even if it now happened to be imprisoned in an evil place; the Talisman, axle of all possible worlds.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“A woman in love, is what. In my experience, they got their own laws.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“Above him was a half-moon and what seemed like a trillion stars. To match the trillion pebbles, just as mysterious, that we walk over every day, he thought. Mystery above, mystery below. Weight, mass, reality: mystery all around.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Elevation
“After all, there are other worlds than these and that train rolls through all of them.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“After that we’re going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Age looked at youth, and youth’s applause first weakened, then died.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“Ah, it’s a real pit. Sort of place where they eat what they run over on the road. Gorillaville. You eat the beer, then you drink.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“All Frank knew was that the ones you really had to watch out for in this world were the ones that couldn’t love even a cat or a dog.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“All is silent in the halls of the dead. All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead, Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“All of us look younger and sweeter when we smile our real smiles, the ones that come when we’re genuinely happy.”
Stephen King
From a Buick 8
“All that money and still unable to count the blessings of her life, beginning with freedom from the paycheck.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“All that profligate investment of energy to effect a splendid, momentary reversal of natural law. That such a reversal should demand so much and last such a short time was terrible; that people would go for it anyway was both terrible and wonderful.
Stephen King
The Talisman
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Although I lean toward the rational, the known, and the empiric – having never seen a ghost, or had a flash of precognition – I must admit there are elements of your story I can’t dismiss out of hand.”
Stephen King
Later
“Although love is a dangerous word when it comes from men.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“And didn’t they say that, although curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought the beast back?”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“And fire was evil stuff that delighted in escaping the hands which created it.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“And I believe in A. Conan Doyle, who had Sherlock Holmes say, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“And I guess you judge how well you’re doing by how well you sleep at night… and what your dreams are like.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“And so thinking, she slipped not into sleep, but into that umbilical cord which connects sleeping and waking.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“And suddenly it didn’t seem to matter anymore, nothing would matter if she could turn over, turn over and see the stars, turn over and look once and die.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“And what do we get for our faith? For the centuries we’ve given this church or that one our gifts of blood and treasure? The assurance that heaven is waiting for us at the end of it all, and when we get there, the punch line will be explained and we’ll say, ‘Oh yeah! Now I get it.’ That’s the big payoff. It’s dinned into our ears from our earliest days: heaven, heaven, heaven! We will see our lost children, our dear mothers will take us in their arms! That’s the carrot.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Revival
“And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“And when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you’re inside.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Anger is the most useless emotion,” Henchick intoned, “destructive to the mind and hurtful to the heart.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Animals don’t know as much about jealousy as people, but they’re not ignorant of it, either.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“Annie was not swayed by pleas. Annie was not swayed by screams. Annie had the courage of her convictions.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Another part of getting older: you forgot what you wanted to remember, and remembered what you wanted to forget.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“Any big hotels have got scandals,” he said. “Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack or stroke or something like that. Hotels are superstitious places. No thirteenth floor or room thirteen, no mirrors on the back of the door you come in through, stuff like that.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“Any game looks straight if everyone is being cheated at once.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“Any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“Any system created by the mind of man can be hacked by the mind of man.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“Anyone who lives in Boston knows that it’s March that’s the cruelest, holding out a few days of false hope and then gleefully hitting you with the shit.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it’s like a law of nature.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“Anything is possible,” she said to the empty room. “Anything at all. The world is full of strange nooks and crannies.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Apple pie without a piece of cheese is like a smooch without a squeeze.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“Around and around it went, and what was round had no point, any fool knew that.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent. Any parent with a hard hand can crush it, but to nurture it is much more difficult.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write. As always the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a brick wall.
Stephen King
Misery
“As his father liked to say, it was good to have goals. They could bring you through tough times.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“As his mouth flooded with that horrible sweet purple taste, he could actually see those grapes dull, dusty, obese and nasty, crawling up a dirty stucco wall in a thick, syrupy sunlight that was silent except for the stupid buzz of many flies.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read the scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelations. They were the victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent lawyers, or police frame-ups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a different scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else, and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“As soon as you have a child, you see your own tombstone”
Stephen King
Christine
“As the twig is bent the bough is shaped, that was another old saying, and once a pretentious asshole, always a pretentious asshole.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“As we become aware of our own unavoidable termination, we become aware of the fear-emotion. And I think that, as copulation tends towards self-preservation; all fear tends towards a comprehension of the final ending.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“As Wendy watched them they burst into a chord of tinkling, girlish laughter. She felt a smile touch her own lips; not one of them could be under sixty.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“At fifty-one you had to keep running just to escape the avalanche of your own past.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“At Hartford or New Haven or one of those other places where no one in their right mind would want to live.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor—the kind that finds feeding firecrackers wrapped in bread to seagulls unutterably funny.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“At some point in this course, perhaps even tonight, you will read something difficult, something you only partially understand, and your verdict will be this is stupid. Will I argue when you advance that opinion in class the next day? Why would I do such a useless ting? My time with you in short, only thirty-four weeks of classes, and I will not waste it arguing about the merits of this short story or that poem. Why would I, when all such opinions are subjective, and no final resolution can ever be reached?’
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“Beating heroin is child’s play compared to beating your childhood.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“Because everything that goes around comes around. Maybe it’s luck or maybe it’s fate, but either way, it comes back around.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Because in America, you could have anything you wanted, just as long as you could pay for it. If you couldn’t pay, or refused to pay, you would remain needful forever.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“Because ka was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“Because there really is a second world. It exists because people refuse to believe it’s there.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“Because there was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries. For Luke, those mysteries mattered. Someday in the future, he might write books of his own. But here the only future was Back Half. Here, the future of existence was, ‘What good would it do?”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Because they were doing it for themselves. They didn’t have to be a bunch of dazed dummies sitting on the ventriloquist’s knee. It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Because things can get better, and if you give them a chance, they usually do.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“Because things like this you can only say once. And you either get it wrong or right, it’s the end either way, because it’s too hard to ever try to say again.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don’t they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it’s so sad.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“Because writers remember everything, Paul. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Because you may not love the candy-man, but you do love the candy.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“Being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“Belief is a high hurdle to get over and I think it’s even higher for smart people. Smart people know a lot, and maybe that makes them think they know everything.”
Stephen King
Later
“Ben smiled back, ‘Mark Twain said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Between midnight and four, everyone should have permission to speak freely.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Bill Hodges is her touchstone, the way she measures her ability to interact with the world. Which is only another way of saying that he is the way she measures her sanity. Trying to imagine her life with him gone is like standing on top of a skyscraper and looking at the sidewalk sixty stories below.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Books are good, and I read my share, and TV’s okay if you’re stuck in a motel room during a rainstorm, but for Jamie Morton, there was nothing like a movie up there on the big screen.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was ‘unfruitful,’ a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“Boys grow up to be men. And it’s men who cause all the trouble. They’re the ones who shed the blood and poison the earth.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“But everybody tries, you ever notice that?’ he said, following her into one of the swaying gondolas.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility. Every possible choice seemed to have drawbacks, and sometimes he didn’t understand why the drawbacks were drawbacks. It was very hard.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people! People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don’t think it’s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“But music lasts, even pop music. Especially pop music. Sneer at ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty years from now.”
Stephen King
Revival
“But nothing had ever spoiled it, somehow. It could be spoiled, he knew that, but in spite of the reputed fragility of the creative act, it had always been the single toughest thing, the most abiding thing, in his life – nothing had ever been able to pollute that crazy well of dreams: no drink, no drug, no pain.”
Stephen King
Misery
“But now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“But people have a really amazing capacity to get used to stuff, even stuff they don’t understand. A comet shows up in the sky and half the world goes around bawling about the Last Days and the Four Horsemen, but let the comet stay there six months and no one even notices. It’s a big ho-hum.”
Stephen King
From a Buick 8
“But people love a hypocrite, you know they recognize one of their own, and it always feels so good when someone gets caught with his pants down and his dick up and it isn’t you.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“But see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“But she stayed where she was a moment longer, like an animal which has been kept in a cage so long it cannot believe in freedom even when it is offered.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“But small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“But sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. True sorrow is as rare as true love.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“But that’s enough. Fun is fun and done is done. Turn out their lights, beautiful.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“But the real reason he’d gone was the one most bad decisions have in common: it had seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“But there was only that silence, as in the five or ten minutes before a vicious thunder squall strikes, when the purple heads stack up in the sky overhead and the light turns a queer purple-yellow and the wind dies completely.”
Stephen King
It
“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.”
Stephen King
Revival
“But you will, I think,” Irv said, and looked at Charlie with such deep compassion that Andy felt his throat filled with sorrow and fear.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him.”
Stephen King
It
“Cat can have kittens in the oven, girl, but that won’t ever make em muffins.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Cats are the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“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.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Certain lines of work are recession-proof. Funeral parlors always make out. Repo companies and bail bondsmen. Liquor stores. And the dope biz. Because, good times or bad, people are going to want to get high.”
Stephen King
Later
“Children have to grow into their imaginations like a pair of oversized shoes.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Close your eyes and click your heals three times… because there’s no place like Dome.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“Coincidences happen, but I’ve come to believe they are actually quite rare. Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.”
Stephen King
It
“Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“Confession may or may not be good for the soul, but it’s undoubtedly soothing to the nerves.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“Confucius say if man want to grow one row of corn, first must shovel one ton of shit.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Corey Bryant sank into a great forgetful river, and that river was time, and its waters were red.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Crying harder than ever, because she knows he’s telling the truth about needing her. And being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Curiosity killed the cat, you know, but satisfaction brought him back snap-ass happy.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“Dead was the gift that kept on giving. Dead, like diamonds, was forever.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Death was no less a miracle than birth.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerin: exhilarating and dangerous.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Disappointment was never a thing you looked for, but it had a wonderful way of clearing the mind.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Do I know what people say? Sure. I shrug it off. What else can you do? Stop people from talking? You might as well try to stop the wind from blowing.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Do you see this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart will stop.”
Stephen King
Black House
“Dolls with no little girls around to mind them were sort of creepy under any conditions.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to, Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Don’t let your good nature cloud your critical eye. The critical eye should always be cold and clear.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who dream – or don’t dream in a way they can often remember when they wake up – are mentally constipated in some way.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Dreams are the way we touch the unseen world, that’s what I believe. They are a special gift.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Drew didn’t know where old man Prescott had gotten the small army of gun thugs he was counting on to keep that move from happening, but he was sure it would come to him eventually. Everything was eventual.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.”
Stephen King
It
“Dying was a part of living. You had to keep tuning in to that if you expected to be a whole person. And if the fact of your own death was hard to understand, at least it wasn’t impossible to accept.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”
Stephen King
It
“Eighty percent of success is just showing up.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Emily Dickinson said her poem was her letter to the world that never wrote to her, they read that in school, but Barbara herself has never written a letter at all.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“End of watch is what they call it, but Hodges himself has found it impossible to give up watching.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“Even a little kid knows certain basic things if he’s not soft in the attic.”
Stephen King
Later
“Even people capable of living in the past don’t really know what the future holds.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“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.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Everyone loves something for nothing…even if it costs everything.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“Everyone needs a hobby,” he said. “And everyone needs a miracle or two, just to prove life is more than just one long trudge from the cradle to the grave.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Everything leads to this, he thought. To this elevation. If it’s how dying feels, everyone should be glad to go.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“Fear can hold you prisoner. Hope can set you free.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“First comes smiles, then lies. Last is gunfire.-Roland Deschain, of Gilead.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“Flakes of snow swirled and danced across the porch. The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact it was now cut off from the world… Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“For a woman a man will do many things that he’d turn his back on in an instant when alone; things he’d back away from, nine times out of ten, even when drunk and with a bunch of his friends egging him on.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“For days it can be good, weeks, even, and then there’s something to swallow.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“For most of us, I think it’s easier to admit doing wrong than being stupid.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable of doing it, but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“For those of us who are not members of a biker gang or the Marine Corps, solidarity means little more than the compassionate impulse that leads us to comfort a bereft friend; for Beezer and his merry band, solidarity is the assurance that someone’s always got your back.”
Stephen King
Black House
“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it’s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It’s a man’s most anonymous age.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“Frightened people live in their own special hell. You could say they make it themselves, but they can’t help it. It’s the way they’re built. They deserve sympathy and compassion.”
Stephen King
Revival
“From outside came a sudden and loud music of birds celebrating their existence.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“Garraty thought that memories were like a line drawn in the dirt. The further back you went the scruffier and harder to see that line got. Until finally there was nothing but smooth sand and the black hole of nothingness that you came out of.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“Get on before I blow you lose of your shoes and give your fathers cause to celebrate!”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“Give a man or woman back his self-respect, and in most cases-not all, but most-you also give back that person’s ability to think with at least some clarity.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“Go to hell,’ she said merrily, ‘nobody lives forever.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy”
Stephen King
Joyland
“God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to f*** up too often”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“God loves to make a man break a vow.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“God says, “Sure, take away the safety net. And when that’s gone, take away the tight rope too.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing interstellar Xbox. Isn’t that funny?”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain: Carrie White eats shit.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves. There would be no grave for this man, and no more gravity, either. He had been given a special dispensation.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“Grownups have a tough time believing, and I’ll tell you why. When they find out as kids that Santa Claus is a fake and Goldilocks isn’t a real girl and the Easter Bunny is bullshit – just three examples, I could give more – it makes a complex and they stop believing anything they can’t see for themselves.”
Stephen King
Later
“Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“Hadn’t somebody said that perfect paranoia and perfect awareness was the same thing?”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“Hallorann saw a grave sort of beauty there that had been missing on the day he had first met her, some nine months ago. Then she had still been mostly girl. Now she was a woman, a human being who had been dragged around to the dark side of the moon and had come back able to put the pieces back together. But those pieces, Hallorann thought, they never fit just the same way again. Never in this world.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“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? “Let it”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Have I gotten everything right? I doubt it. Not even the great Daniel Defoe did that; in Robinson Crusoe, our hero strips naked, swims out to the ship he has recently escaped….and then fills up his pockets with items he will need to stay alive on his desert island.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“Having a breakdown was like breaking a vase and then gluing it back together. You could never trust yourself to handle that vase again with any surety. You couldn’t put a flower in it because flowers need water and water might dissolve the glue. Am I crazy, then?”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he’s alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“He began to limp home, because home was where you went when you were hurt and beaten.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“He burst out laughing. She probably wouldn’t like it, but he couldn’t help it. That was the way laughing was, sort of like farting, sometimes you could hold it in but a lot of times you couldn’t.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Desperation
“He could feel the pores of his body open like a million mouths and slurp the water in like a sponge.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“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
The Talisman
“He didn’t need a psychiatrist to point out that writing had its autoerotic side — you beat a typewriter instead of your meat, but both acts depended largely on quick wits, fast hands and a heartfelt commitment to the art of the farfetched.”
Stephen King
Misery
“He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation’s equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on?”
Stephen King
The Stand
“He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.”
Stephen King
Misery
“He felt feverish and a little sick to his stomach. How could a normal man in the twenty-first century accept a shape-shifting monster? If you believed in Holly Gibney’s outsider, her El Cuco, then everything was on the table. No end to the universe.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“He felt that if he could get deep down in himself quickly enough, he would be okay, but sympathy might drive him mad.”
Stephen King
Christine
“He fled the light and the knowledge the light implied, and so came back to himself. Even so do the rest of us; even so the best of us.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“He had an instinct for mischief in his head, just as some people have a way with numbers or a clear sense of direction.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.”
Stephen King
Misery
“He had live long enough to know there was a little scumbag in everyone, but it didn’t help much when you had to take out the trash.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“He holds out a hand which arthritis has turned into a driftwood sculpture.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“He is a mechanic of the brain. He has cut it to pieces and found no soul. Therefore there is none. Like the Russian astronauts who circled the earth and did not see God. It is the empiricism of the mechanic, and a mechanic is only a child with superior motor control.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“He knew as well as we in our own world do that the road to hell is paved with good intentions–but he also knew that, for human beings, good intentions are sometimes all there are. Angels may be safe from damnation, but human beings are less fortunate things, and for them hell is always close.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“He lay back, put his arm over his eyes, and tried to hold onto the anger, because the anger made him feel brave. A brave man could think. A coward couldn’t.”
Stephen King
Misery
“He looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“He needs to be corrected, if you don’t mind me saying so. He needs a good talking-to, and perhaps a bit more. My own girls, sir, didn’t care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of my matches and tried to burn it down. I corrected them. I corrected them most harshly. And when my wife tried to stop me from doing my duty, I corrected her.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“He peered into the pack and saw two or three more pieces. He could eat them now, but it might be better to wait.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“He read the way free-range cows graze, moving to wherever the grass is greenest. That was a thing her husband chose to ignore, because the strangeness of it frightened him. It frightened her as well, which was probably one reason why she knew nothing of Luke’s tutorial on Balkan history. He hadn’t told her because she hadn’t asked.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed, filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“He rolled in his bed, twisting the sheets, grappling with a problem years too big for him, awake in the night like a single sentinel on picket. And sometime after midnight, he slept, too, and then only the wind was awake, prying at the hotel and hooting in its gables under the bright gimlet gaze of the stars.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“He said one of the reasons the stock market tanked so bad back in 1929 was because the more people traded, the farther behind the tickers got.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him making him smile.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“He supposed that if he were a young female hitchhiker, he might ask a question or two himself before hopping willy-nilly into someone’s car or truck. It might not help, but it sure couldn’t hurt. Because once you were out in the desert, anything could happen to you.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“He thought he had discovered one of life’s great truths (and one he could have done without) the only thing harder than saying goodbye to yourself, a pound at a time, was saying goodbye to your friends.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“He threw the paperweight into the corner and it shattered. He left without waiting to see what might leak out of it.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.”
Stephen King
It
“He touched McVries’s shoulders, setting him straight again. McVries looked up at him sleepily and smiled. “No, Ray. It’s time to sit down.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“He used to say what you deserve has nothing to do with where you finish.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“He walked out of nowhere toward nowhere, a man from another time who, it seemed, had reached a point of pointless ending.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“He wanted her, suddenly and completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to her.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy. Sometimes a hug was telepathy.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power to make mischief.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate – they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“He was a romantic in his own harsh way…yet he was also realist enough to know that some times love actually did conquer all.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“He was at peace with God, Satan, and the universe. If he was not yet at complete peace with himself, that was only because his pilgrimage was not yet over.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“He was Naked. He sat in the chain with his bare feet neatly together and watched the program. He was waiting for it to get dark. After it got dark, he would begin waiting for it to get late. When it was late, he would begin waiting for it to get early. When it got early and the pulse of the hotel was at its slowest, he would stop waiting and go upstairs to Room 1317 and kill Dr. Wanlass.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“He was nothing but a conduit, after all, and there isn’t a culvert in the world that remembers the water flowed through it once the rain has stopped.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially–not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“He was only twelve, and understood that his experience of the world was limited, but one thing he was quite sure of: when someone said trust me, they were usually lying through their teeth.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling ill somehow—walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“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.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“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
Pet Sematary
“Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently — he had a memory, both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice’s a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the wine the sommelier had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking: ‘We sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other’s assholes, and it all comes to about the same.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Her body was wrapped in shadows like moth wings, like rose-petals.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“Hey police? I just saw the world’s oldest, slowest kid climbing into Pleasant view Cemetery. Looked like he was dying to get in. Yeah, looked like a grave matter to me. Kidding? Oh no, I’m in dead earnest. Maybe you ought to dig into it.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“High school isn’t a very important place. When you’re going you think it’s a big deal, but when it’s over nobody really thinks it was great unless they’re beered up.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“His so-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin.”
Stephen King
Misery
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil’s music.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Hodges has read there are wells in Iceland so deep you can drop a stone down them and never hear the splash. He thinks some human souls are like that.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Hodges remembers an old saying: even on the darkest day, the sun shines on some dog’s ass.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.”
Stephen King
It
“Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Home is where they want you to stay longer.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Homesickness is a real sickness—the ache of the uprooted plant.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners. The dead were all around, but living people saw them no more than they could smell most of the ten thousand aromas that surrounded them every minute of every day.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“How do we remember to remember? That’s a question I’ve asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“How else could he go on, except with merciful incomprehension held before him like a shield? How could anyone?”
Stephen King
Desperation
“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.”
Stephen King
Misery
“How many times, over how many years, had he—a grown man—asked for the mercy of another chance? He was suddenly so sick of himself, so revolted, that he could have groaned aloud.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing?’ he asked himself. ‘How much courage to go on and do that after you’ve spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, ‘I have to quit these peas, peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“Hugh stretched out one hand and stroked the fur. It felt cold and rich; it crackled with silky static electricity. Stroking it was like stroking a clear autumn night.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“Humans were built to look back; that’s why we have that swivel joint in our necks.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on, I think, but in little towns the makeup tends to be thin.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“I always like to see enlightened parents like that; it gives me hope for the future.”
Stephen King
Christine
“I believe in my consciousness and my unconscious, even though I don’t know what those things are.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“I believe that the combination of pencil and memory creates a kind of practical magic, and magic is dangerous.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“I believe the one thing the God of this world likes best is to give the business to people who say ‘never.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“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.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“I deal in lead! Roland called, and Eddie felt goose-bumps pebble his arms.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“I did something good for you just now. Before the sun goes down tonight, I want you to pass it on.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“I don’t believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die—I don’t want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created—but I believe there has to be something.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“I don’t have to listen to rumors about a man when I can judge him for myself.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“I don’t mean to scare you, but sometimes a scare is the only lesson that works.”
Stephen King
Later
“I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“I don’t think the world starts to come into focus until you’re fifteen or sixteen; up until then you just take what you’ve got and roll with it.”
Stephen King
Later
“I don’t believe that there’s anything new under the sun. Oh, sometimes the glitter they sprinkle over the top of a thing changes, but that’s all. What’s been tried once had been tried once before…and before…and before.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“I don’t mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns – you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It’s just that creative people have creative breakdowns.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“I dreamed of you. I dreamed you were wandering in the dark, and so was I. We found each other.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“I felt comfortable as only one can on such a night, when all is miserable outside and all is warmth and comfort inside.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“I felt the warmth that any man or woman feels when he or she is looking at something pretty, something that has been worked and made—that’s the thing that really separates us from the animals.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“I got to cover my ass, buddy. In this world, nobody else does it for you.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“I had a friend who used to tell me that all the time,” Holly said, and suddenly felt like crying. It was that phrase—I had a friend. Time had passed, and time probably did heal all wounds, but God, some of them healed so slowly. And the difference between I have and I had was such a gulf.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“I hold to no God,” Roland said. “I hold to the Tower, and won’t pray to that.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“I just didn’t want her to get hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don’t they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“I know your mother lives in your head – almost everyone’s mother does, I guess – but you can’t let her have her way on this one.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“I learned that every addict knows two things: he can’t use and he must use. That’s the knot in your head, see? You can’t cut it and you can’t untie it, so you have to learn to rise above it. It can be done, but you have to remember the basic situation. You must but you can’t.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“I like a woman who hasn’t decided the kitchen’s a place of slavery just because she works for a livin.” “I feel absolutely the same way about a man,”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“I looked at what he built, and to me it explained the stars.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“I love you with all that passes for my heart. I suspect that kind of all-out love becomes a burden to a woman in time, but it’s the only kind I have to give.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“I loved you then and I love you now and I have loved you every second in between.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“I metaphor for sex, but she slapped my face and walked away when I asked.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“I must accept those things over which I have no control. I must turn my adversities into advantages.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“I obsess over the possibility of bad reviews and brood over them when they come. But they don’t get me down for long; I just kill a few children and old ladies, and then I’m right as a trivet again.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don’t mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good… something that was good but still a secret.”
Stephen King
Christine
“I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“I see things, that’s all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“I still believe in the resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love; I still believe that connections between people can be made and that the spirits which inhabit us sometimes touch. I still believe that the cost of these connections is horribly, outrageously high… and I still believe that the value received far outweighs the price which must be paid.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“I think all mothers shine a little, you know, at least until their kids grow up enough to watch out for themselves.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
The Shining
“I think I might just go out back for awhile, and sit under that big tree. I feel empty inside. I never felt so empty.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“I think it was someone else. I think it was an outsider.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“I think it’s relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn’t cost them anything. It doesn’t keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is more unsettling.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“I think most kids have a place they go to when they’re scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or The Shire, Boo’ya Moon if they’ve got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget. The talented few – like Scott – harness their dreams and turn them into horses.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“I think part of being a parent is trying to kill your kids.”
Stephen King
Christine
“I think reality 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.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“I think that people who say life is all about the choices we make and the roads we go down are full of shit. When the fickle finger of fate points at you, all roads lead to the same place, that’s what I think. I may change my mind when I’m older, but I really don’t think so.”
Stephen King
Later
“I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“I think that’s what people most always do with the stuff they can’t make out – just forget it.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“I think we mostly live alone. By choice, like him, or just because that’s the way the world was made.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“I thought of telling him I didn’t know about reasons, only about chains—how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you’re lucky. Strangled, if you’re not.”
Stephen King
From a Buick 8
“I thought you were good, but you are not good. You are just a lying old dirty birdie.”
Stephen King
Misery
“I used to laugh at that old wheeze about a man wanting his son to be better than he was, but as I get older it seems less funny and more true.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“I was being paid to do what I loved, and there’s no gig on earth better than that; it’s like a license to steal.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot – so hot – and you gave me ice.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“I went into the can and shut the door before he had a chance to reply. And the next fifteen seconds or so were pure relief. Like beer, iced tea is something can can’t buy, only rent.”
Stephen King
From a Buick 8
“I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“I’m a man of the world, and all that means is I understand what powers the world. The fuel mix is one part high-octane to nine parts pure bullshit.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“I’m not taking that,” Mort said, and part of him was marveling at what a really accommodating beast a man was: when someone held something out to you, your first instinct was to take it. No matter if it was a check for a thousand dollars or a stick of dynamite with a lit and fizzing fuse, your first instinct was to take it.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“I’m so afraid that all I can reach will lead me to all I dare not see.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”
Stephen King
Christine
“If everyone knows what there is to know, it stops a lot of tongues from a lot of useless wagging.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I’m going to kill myself, because I won’t know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do.”
Stephen King
It
“If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say ‘I can do this’ even when you know you can’t.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“If I may borrow from George R. R. Martin, she is my sun and stars.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“If it’s ka, it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than a barn before a cyclone.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“If life hands you lemons, make lemonade! Words to live by, especially when you kept in mind that the only way to make them into lemonade was to squeeze the hell out of them.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“If our faith is strong, we’ll go to heaven, and we’ll understand the whole thing when we get there. As if life were a joke, and heaven the place where the cosmic punchline is finally explained to us.”
Stephen King
Revival
“If people just took it a day at a time, they’d be a lot happier.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples. I’ll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it’s yours.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“If we believe in monsters, in the supernatural, how do we believe in anything?”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“If we don’t have each other, we go crazy with loneliness. When we do, we go crazy with togetherness.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“If you can’t let go of the past, the mistakes you’ve made will eat you alive.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“If you can’t laugh when things go bad–laugh and put on a little carnival–then you’re either dead or wishing you were.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“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.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“If you haven’t considered it already, consider it now: there is every possibility that some of us, or all of us, may live and triumph, only to stand trial for murder.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“If you look like you belong in a place, most people think you do.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“If you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn’t always pretty.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“If you try to outrun your own shadow, you’re bound to fall on your face.”
Stephen King
Later
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“If you’re just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“If you’ve ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you’ll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“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”
Stephen King
On Writing
“I’m going out for a bottle of champagne. We’re going to get bombed.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“I’m having a magenta day. Not just red, but magenta!”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“I’m not laughing at you guys,” King said. “It’s actually against my religion to laugh at men who are toting guns.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles. Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me. What I was lacking.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“I’m one of those people who don’t really know what he thinks until he writes it down.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“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 been in the dark. Mostly it’s the pain. There’s too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can’t.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“In a book, all would have gone according to plan… but life was so untidy — what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren’t even any chapters?”
Stephen King
Misery
“In a democracy we sometimes have to put up with things we don’t life or approve of.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“In a terrified world, false news was king.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“In a week, you’ll take it for granted,” he said dismissively. “That’s the way it works with miracles.”
Stephen King
Revival
“In here I’m the guy who can get things for you… outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don’t think I could make it.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“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.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“In spite of the problems he was having he was going on with his life. There are thousands who don’t or won’t or can’t and plenty of them aren’t in prison either.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“In that instant she knew what it must feel like to cross a river into a foreign country, and then set fire to the bridge behind you, and stand on the riverbank, watching and breathing deeply as your only chance of retreat went up in smoke.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“In the brain of a madman only the fuming present exists, with its endless shouting urges, paranoid speculations, and grandiose assumptions.”
Stephen King
Black House
“In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin.”
Stephen King
Misery
“In the end we are reduced to saying It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“In the sudden, brief silence, she heard something within her turn over. Perhaps only her soul.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“In the years since, I’ve discovered there’s a lot to be said for boredom.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“In this universe there might grow roses which sing.”
Stephen King
It
“Insofar as story is concerned, and pleasure is concerned, there are not enough Stephen Kings to go around.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“Is so-and-so a bigger asshole than Truman?” Few could compare—in fact, so far, officially, there was only Donald Trump and cannibals.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“It ain’t the blows we’re dealt that matter, but the ones we survive.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“It conjured up an image of fate, not blind at all but equipped with sentient 20/20 vision and intent on grinding helpless mortals between the great millstones of the universe to make some unknown bread.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“It doesn’t matter if you believe in God Nick, he believes in you.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“It doesn’t have to be the last good time. But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“It is the laugh of a man in the grip of fond recall- the sight of a sunset, the firm feel of a woman’s breast through a thin silk shirt (not that Barry has, in Henry’s estimation, ever felt such a thing), or the packed warmth of beach sand.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“It is what it is, right? As Nora used to say when she came home from those meetings of hers: life is what we make it and acceptance is the key to all our affairs.’
Stephen King
Elevation
“It makes no difference if you’re rich or poor Or if you’re smart or dumb. A woman’s place in this old world is under some man’s thumb, and if you’re born a woman You’re born to be hurt. You’re born to be stepped on, Lied to, cheated on, and treated like dirt. —Sandy Posey, “Born a Woman” Lyrics by Martha Sharp”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“It proves little, except that perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“It starts here. From its field of roses, the Dark Tower cries out in its beast’s voice. Time is a face on the water.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“It starts with this: 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. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“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.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“It was a moment he remembered for years after, as though a special small slice had been cut from the cake of time. If nothing fires between two people, such an instant simply falls back into the general wrack of memory.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“It was also wonderful to know what was coming next, and to feel sure it wasn’t going to include something sudden and painful.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“It was blurred in his memory, it had the melting, cotton-candy texture of dreams or of waking actions performed under a light haze of drugs.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“It was funny stuff, sanity. When it was taken away, you didn’t know it. You didn’t feel its departure. You only really knew it when it was restored, like some rare wild bird which lived and sang within you not by decree but by choice.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“It was good not to be alone in this anymore. He really hadn’t realized how heavy that burden was until now.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“It was like drowning, only from the inside out.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“It was no dream she said. Dreams fade. Reality doesn’t.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“It was not just Danny the Overlook was working on. It was working on him, too. It wasn’t Danny who was the weak link, it was him. He was the vulnerable one, the one who could be bent and twisted until something snapped.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“It was over. We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“It was strange how some of childhood’s words and ways fell at the wayside and were left behind, while others clamped tight and rode for life, growing the heavier to carry as time passed.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“It was sweet and lovely, that smile, perhaps the more so because it wasn’t complicated by much in the way of thought.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“It was the look of some woman in a third world country, watching as her village burned.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“It was wrong, but sometimes you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelette.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“It was, he supposed, one of the advantages of having married a doctor- you could shove the kid at your husband whenever the kid seemed to be dying.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“It wasn’t dark yet, but getting there; the shadows under the trees were thick and velvety, somehow luscious.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“It wasn’t fair, but what is? Life is a crap carnival with shit prizes.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“It would have been foolish and melodramatic to call it the smell of lost hope, but that was what it smelled like to Holly, just the same.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“It would not do to tell other people, not just because they wouldn’t believe but because they wouldn’t care.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“It’s a dream, Drew thought. Another dream, got to be. In no version of reality could a man be lawyered at by a rodent.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“It’s about how some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they’re too blind, too emotionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth’s dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“It’s best to be ruthless with the past. It ain’t the blows we’re dealt that matter, but the ones we survive.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’ That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“It’s going to be all right, Gold had said, and that was what Terry hung onto. But of course it wasn’t.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“It’s gonna be all right,” he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“It’s hard to like what you’re scared of. Maybe impossible.”
Stephen King
Later
“It’s like my mother used to say—people have more fun than anybody, except for horses, and they can’t.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“It’s like you taught me to smoke marijuana and enjoy it, and now you’re saying, ‘If you like pot, you’ll really like heroin.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“It’s really just paint. I muse on that, sometimes, Jamie. When I can’t sleep. How a little paint can make shallow water seem deep.”
Stephen King
Revival
“It’s a little place on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory. That’s where I want to live the rest of my life. A warm place with no memory.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“It’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“It’s alright to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“It’s funny how close the past is, sometimes. Sometimes it seems as if you could almost reach out and touch it. Only who really wants to?”
Stephen King
From a Buick 8
“It’s God’s nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth, Tom had told her.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“It’s just that I take riddling seriously. I was taught that the ability to solve them indicates a sane and rational mind.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“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.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“It’s strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“It’s the world’s smallest violin, playing ‘My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for you’.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“I’ve spent my whole life doing some things because they were logical and not doing others because they were not. I’ve seen what happens when people act on intuition, or for illogical reasons. Sometimes the results are ludicrous and embarrassing; more often they are simply horrible. But here I am, just the same, behaving like a crackbrained crystal gazer.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“Just go on dancing with me like this forever and I’ll never tire. We’ll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“Just promise me you’ll stop every once in a while and acknowledge the day, honey. It’s the only one you’ll have until tomorrow.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Just remember that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Knowing a thing and having the truth of it redden your skin were two different things.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don’t know if I can ‘cuz I’m so afraid of the tommyknocker man.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“Learning itself is a present, you know. The best one anybody can give or get.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Let it eat her; let it beat her. It could do both. But she would not beat herself.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both. Fools, perchance. Let the word go before you. Let your shadow grow. Let it grow hair on its face. Let it become dark. Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Life is a tiger you have to grab by the tail, and if you don’t know the nature of the beast it will eat you up.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Life is a wheel, and it always comes back around to where it started.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Life is like Friday on a soap opera. It gives you the illusion that everything is going to wrap up, and then the same old shit starts up on Monday.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“Life is more than just steering a course around pain.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“Life is too sweet to give up without a fight, don’t you think?”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Life is what we make it and acceptance is the key to all our affairs.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it had started.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“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
The Stand
“Life’s simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Lift the rug of your subconscious and sweep all the dirt under. Good-bye.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Lightning flashed dully inside the clouds on the horizon making them look as if they had fireflies of their own, monster fireflies the size of dinosaurs.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief, but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it?”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Like measles, mumps, or rubella, tragedy was contagious. Unlike those diseases, there was no vaccine.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Like the scorpion said to the maiden as she lay dying, ‘You knowed I was poison when you picked me up.’ ”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“Looking back on it, Sloat wasn’t sure how he had tolerated Phil Sawyer for as long as he had. His partner had never played to win, not seriously; he had been encumbered by sentimental notions of loyalty and honor, corrupted by the stuff you told kids to get them halfway civilized before you finally tore the blindfold off their eyes.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“Looking Roland straight in the eyes–blue meeting blue amid the endless choir of voices–King said, “I lied, brother.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Looking up at that starry sky gave him the creeps: it was too big, too black. It was all too possible to imagine it turning blood-red, all too possible to imagine a Face forming in lines of fire.”
Stephen King
It
“Losers so dumb that they mistook wrapping themselves in the chains of addiction as an act of rebellion.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Loss changes you. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s good. Either way, you eat your goddam pork chop and go on.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“Lots of people have got a little of what I call the shining, but mostly it’s just a twinkle—the kind of thing that lets em know what the DJ’s going to play next on the radio or that the phone’s gonna ring pretty soon.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Love among the ruins… I’ll tell you something, my friend: Weird love’s better than no love at all.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Love is a gift; love is also a chain with a manacle at each end.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“Love is old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a canibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile, it is always hungry”
Stephen King
Christine
“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.”
Stephen King
Christine
“Love is the most pernicious drug of all. Let the romantics debate its existence. Pragmatists accept it and use it.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“Lying in the bed that had once held two, Lisey thought alone never felt more lonely than when you woke up and discovered you still had the house to yourself. That you and the mice in the walls were the only ones still breathing.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“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
The Stand
“Margaret had a face like the ass end of a gasoline truck and a body to match.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Maureen was looking at him with amazement and dawning hope, but Luke hardly noticed. He was deep in the problem, tracing the lines back to the central point where those lines could be cut.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“May be she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Maybe that was strange. Maybe it was sad. Maybe it was what literary types called irony.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Maybe that’s one of the ways you recognize really lonely people . . . they can always think of something neat to do on rainy days. You can always call them up. They’re always home.”
Stephen King
Christine
“Maybe there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends – maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”
Stephen King
It
“Memory has a way of slipping a few gears after sixty-five, when people round the third turn start down the home stretch.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“Memory is the basis of every journey.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Mild white light coming in through the roof chinks, catching motes of chaff in half a hundred pencil-thin sunbeams. Motes of chaff dancing and revolving.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“Mind over matter in any form is a terrific drain on the body’s resources.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Money was no cure for sorrow, Alec reflected, but it did allow one to grieve in relative comfort.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“More coffee?” Hodges declines with a smile. Hot can only do so much for bad coffee.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Most people are sheep and sheep don’t eat meat.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Mothers were naturals for law enforcement, because toddlers, like criminals, were often belligerent and destructive.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“Mr. Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got the knack, and some people don’t. Hilly didn’t.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“Mrs. Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“Much better than The Shining and Barry Lyndon, in my opinion, but of course he was much younger when he made it. Young artists are much more likely to be risk-takers, in my opinion.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“Music matters,” he told me once. “Pop fiction goes away, TV shows go away, and I defy you to tell me what you saw at the movies two years ago. But music lasts, even pop music. Especially pop music. Sneer at ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head’ if you want to, but people will still be listening to that silly piece of shit fifty”
Stephen King
Revival
“My father had taught me – mostly by example – that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, a sentiment I’ve never believed should be restricted to just writers.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. I’ve always thought that was good advice.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“My heart’s with you, Bill, no matter how it turns out. My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.”
Stephen King
It
“My tongue runs like a supermarket conveyor belt on payday.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Never believe a writer. Listen to them, by all means, but never believe them.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“Never tell a lie when you can tell the truth. The truth isn’t always the safest course, but mostly it is.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people’s heads is none of their smocking business.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“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
The Dead Zone
“No good friends, no bad friends; only people you want, need to be with. People who build their houses in your heart.”
Stephen King
It
“No great thing is created suddenly.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“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.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver, he thought. The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“No, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“No, of course you don’t think that is possible. You look at my face and you see a monster. You look at my hands and see them covered with the blood you ordered me to spill. But I tell you, Cap, it will happen. The girl has had no friend for going on two years. She has had her father and that is all. You see her as you see me, Cap. It is your great failing. You look, you see a monster. Only in the girl’s case, you see a useful monster. Perhaps that is because you are a white man. White men see monsters everywhere. White men look at their own pricks and see monsters.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“No. I was going to say his work changed my life, but that’s not right. I don’t think a teenager has much of a life to change. I just turned eighteen last month. I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“None of this was real, after all. It was just a refuge in her mind.”
Stephen King
The Regulators
“None of us really has anything to lose. That makes it easier to give away.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Not all boats which sail into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.”
Stephen King
It
“Not all is silent in the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. Even now some of the stuff the Old Ones left behind still works. And that’s really the horror of it, wouldn’t you say? Yes. The exact horror of it.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Not being sure of things, he knew, was a charmless corner of purgatory reserved for writers who were driving fast with no idea at all where they were going.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Not really. I’ve seen Paths of Glory at least a dozen times. It’s one of Mr. Kubrick’s finest. Much better than The Shining and Barry Lyndon, in my opinion, but of course he was much younger when he made it.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Not so long ago he had avoided the bathroom scale because it showed too many pounds; now he stayed away for the opposite reason. The irony was not lost on him. For the time”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Nothing screws with memory like repetition.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“Nothing was eternal, except maybe for the mind of God, and even at thirteen I had my doubts about that.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“Now that he was dead, Paul could look at him. The cop looked like a big doll that has been badly treated by a gang of nasty children.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Oddly, the burned hand didn’t seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Oh Christ, he understood more than he wanted to right now. Give me a chance, Louis thought, and I’ll understand myself right into the nearest mental asylum.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“On his days off, he sometimes slept for twelve hours at a stretch. He read legal thrillers by John Grisham and the entire Song of Ice and Fire series. He was a big fan of Tyrion Lannister. Tim knew there was a TV show based on the Martin books, but felt no need to watch it; his imagination provided all the dragons he needed.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“On the subject of love at first sight, I’m with the Beatles: I believe that it happens all the time.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“One does not always need to hear a slam to know that the door has been closed.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“One great thing about hard drugs – everything still hurts, but you don’t give a shit.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“One of the few things I’ve learned since then about the fundamental differences between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.”
Stephen King
Revival
“One of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“One of the worst things about being a kid, maybe the very worst, is how grownups ignore you when they get going on their shit.”
Stephen King
Later
“Only a silly person would try to start a good work with a bad tool.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That’s what makes them children.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Our memories have voices, too. Often sad ones that clamor like raised arms in the dark.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“Overhead was a sky blacker than jewelers’ velvet, and a billion stars screamed down.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“Parents who can’t carry a tune in a tin pail can produce a singing prodigy; illiterates can produce a great writer. Sometimes talent comes from nowhere, or so it seems.”
Stephen King
Later
“Passage between worlds. Then the gunfire. Then the killing.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“Payback is a bitch, and the bitch is back.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“People assume any twentieth-century white male writer must be an alcoholic.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“People had the mistaken idea that Poe wrote fantastic stories about the supernatural, when in fact he wrote realistic stories about abnormal psychology.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“People have many ways to be lousy to one another, as you’ll find out when you’re older, but I think that all bad behavior stems from plain old selfishness.”
Stephen King
Revival
“People loved their pets, often with a degree of openness they couldn’t allow themselves to express toward other people.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“People say that where there’s life, there’s hope, and I have no quarrel with that, but I also believe the reverse. There is hope, therefore I live.”
Stephen King
Revival
“People think first love is sweet, and never sweeter than when that first bond snaps. You’ve heard a thousand pop and country songs that prove the point; some fool got his heart broke. Yet that first broken heart is always the most painful, the slowest to mend, and leaves the most visible scar. What’s so sweet about that?”
Stephen King
Joyland
“People who shine can sometimes see things that are gonna happen, and I think sometimes they can see things that did happen. But they’re just like pictures in a book.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“People’s minds, particularly the minds of children, are like wells—deep wells full of sweet water. And sometimes, when a particular thought is too unpleasant to bear, the person who has that thought will lock it into a heavy box and throw it into that well. He listens for the splash… and then the box is gone. Except it is not, of course. Not really.”
Stephen King
The Eyes of the Dragon
“Perhaps all the science-fiction stories he read about time travel when he was a teenager had it right: you can’t change the past, no matter how you try.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Perhaps kids really did come into the world trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth had so confidently proclaimed, but they also shit in their pants until they learned better.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Person did what a person could, whether it was setting up gravestones or trying to convince twenty-first-century men and women that there were monsters in the world, and their greatest advantage was the unwillingness of rational people to believe.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Philosophers have debated the meaning of life for centuries, rarely coming to the same conclusion.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“Pride was the belt you used to hold your pants up when you had no pants.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Promises are easily broken because they are free to give.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“Put an egg in your shoe and beat it, make like a tree and leave, imitate an amoeba and split.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Needful Things
“Ralph reflected for a moment on the similarities between loneliness and insomnia — how they were both insidious, cumulative, and divisive, the friends of despair and the enemies of love.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but 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.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“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.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out. We’re still helping each other.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Reality was deep, and it was far. It held many secrets and went on forever.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so – pardon the pun – so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Rich people can be generous, even the ones with bloodcurdling political views can be generous, but most believe in generosity on their own terms, and underneath (not so deep, either), they’re always afraid someone is going to steal their presents and eat their birthday cake.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Rightly tired of the pain İ hear and feel, boss… where we’s comin from or goin to or why… If İ could end it, İ would. But İ can’t.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Roland could not understand why anyone would want cocaine or any other illegal drug, for that matter, in a world where such a powerful one as sugar was so plentiful and cheap.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, but Carrie White eats shit.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Saint Paul was all too right about that dark glass. We look through it all our days and see nothing but our own reflections.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Same shit, different day, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Sane people don’t sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That’s not science, its superstition.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Selective memory is one of the chief sins of the old, and I don’t have time for it.”
Stephen King
Revival
“September days always seemed to end much too soon, catching me by surprise—it was as if something inside my heart expected it to always be June, with daylight lingering in the sky until almost nine-thirty.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Shadows were too black, and when a breeze stirred the trees, the shadows changed in a disquieting way.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“Shall there be truth between us, as two men? Not as friends, but as enemies and equals?”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“She also belonged to something called the Southeastern Library Association. Which, she said, had no money because “Trump and his cronies took it all back. They understand culture no more than a donkey understands algebra.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“She came to him then and lifted her arms to be picked up, something he could not remember her doing for a long time-maybe two years. It was amazing how time got by, how quickly a child could change, change in front of your eyes with an unobtrusiveness that was nearly terrible.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“She checked her Fitbit again and saw her pulse was now up to one-twenty. She chugged down the rest of her latte, anyway. Living dangerously.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“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.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“She didn’t want to close herself into this bad-smelling room with the old woman, but when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“She didn’t like seeing that look in his face, but she wanted to see it there, she did. He was a man, wasn’t he? And sometimes men had to learn what it was to be afraid of a woman.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“She felt a calmness in him now, a centered lack of fear, that touched her heart with love, and with some queer darkness, as well. He was so different, her son, so special . . . but the world did not love people like that. The world tried to root them out, like tares from a garden.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“She had a bottle of water in her pack—a big one with a squeeze-top—but suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“She is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day, a game for bored children with no bodies and the whole universe at their feet.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“She isn’t a big deal, of course, except to the people who matter in her life, but since these are the only ones she cares about, that’s fine.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“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.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“She pushed the button and like a miracle her head filled with the sound of Jerry Trupiano’s voice… and more importantly, with the sounds of Fenway Park. She was sitting out here in the darkening, drippy woods, lost and alone, but she could hear thirty thousand people. It was a miracle.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“She remembered Scott saying that people shouldn’t be allowed houses with more than two toilets to shit in, it gives them delusions of grandeur.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“She sat there all afternoon in her hot maiden’s bedroom, thinking and dreaming in the dark circle which the splinter spread around her, a darkness which was like the hood of a cobra.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“She suddenly realized she was sitting in an apartment by herself late at night, eating an apple and watching a movie on TV that she cared nothing about, and doing it all because it was easier than thinking, thinking was so boring really, when all you had to think about was yourself and your lost love.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“She thought that things could not get worse… but they always can, and often do.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“She was crazy but he needed her. Oh I am in so much trouble he thought, and stared blindly up at the ceiling as the droplets of sweat began to gather on his forehead again.”
Stephen King
Misery
“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.”
Stephen King
Revival
“She was still uncomfortable about her own motives and afraid to examine them too deeply.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“She was thinking about how quietly you could grow to depend on a person, almost like a junkie with a habit.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“She’s the Queen Bitch of Castle Hell. If you mess with her, she’ll eat you alive.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“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
The Stand
“Silence for a moment in the connection between his place in the world and hers.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Silent white light filled the world. And the righteous and unrighteous alike were consumed in that holy fire.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Small children are great accepters. They don’t understand shame, or the need to hide things.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“So it always has been; so shall it be, life sucks, then you die.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“So yeah, I see dead people. As far as I can remember, I always have. It can be interesting, it can be scary sometimes, it can be a pain in the ass, but mostly it just is. Like being left-handed, or being able to play “classical music when you’re like three years old, or getting early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
Stephen King
Later
“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
Different Seasons
“Some days are treasure. Not many but I think in almost every life there are a few.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“Some tears have to be cried no matter what the hour- until they are, they simply rave and burn inside.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“Some things were better lost than found.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Sometimes a man and a woman reach a crossroads and linger there, reluctant to take either way, knowing the wrong choice will mean the end… and knowing there’s so much worth saving.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Sometimes death is natural, a mercy that puts an end to suffering. But all too often it comes as an assassin, full of senseless cruelty and lacking any vestige of compassion.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Sometimes God dillies and dallies,’ Steve said, ‘and sometimes he just points at you and tells you to hang up your jock.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Sometimes human places, create inhuman monsters.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
The Shining
“Sometimes I look up in spite of myself and see that the hospital wall, painted in soothing pastel yellow, has been replaced with gray stones held together by ancient mortar and covered with ivy. The ivy is dead, and the branches look like skeletal hands. The small door in the wall is hidden, Astrid was right about that, but it’s there. The voice comes from behind it, drifting through an ancient rusty keyhole.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Sometimes loving eyes don’t see what they don’t want to see.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“Sometimes parents needed to be protected.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Sometimes she’d go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he’d often been hard to deal with and hard to live with.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren’t choices at all.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Sometimes you can’t help people. Sometimes it’s better not even to try.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Sometimes you get what you want, but mostly you get what you get.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“Sometimes you had to know. Sometimes you had to see.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Sometimes you just have to do what you can and try to live with it.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“Sometimes, the embers are better than the campfire. It’s strange, but it’s true.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Sons figured out they were bigger and never forgot it. Sons didn’t care about the world they left for their sons or for their daughters, although they said they did when the time came to run for office.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“Sooner or later everything you thought you’d left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“Sorrow for a wrong was better than nothing…but no amount of after-the-fact sorrow could ever atone for joy taken in destruction…”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee or throw a gutter ball when you’re bowling with the girls in the league. True sorrow is as rare as true love.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Story is something happening to someone you have been led to care about.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Strange, the things you noticed when your day—your life—suddenly went over a cliff you hadn’t even known was there.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Strip away the metaphors, Jeannie had said, and you are left with the inexplicable. The supernatural. Only that’s not possible. The supernatural may exist in books and movies, but not in the real world.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Such an ego simply forbade certain lines of thought.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Swear to me swear to me that if it isn’t dead you’ll all come back.”
Stephen King
It
“Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“Talent is a spooky thing, and has a way of announcing itself quietly but firmly when the right time comes. Like certain addictive drugs, it comes as a friend long before you realize it’s a tyrant.”
Stephen King
Revival
“Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won’t carry a quitter.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Tell him he’s wrong. Tell him that even if he’s right about waiting, he’s right for the wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Tell you what, the worst part of growing up is how it shuts you up.”
Stephen King
Later
“Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t have to be afraid all the time.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Terry gave him a look of which only high school teachers are capable: We both know you’re an idiot, but I will not embarrass you in front of your peers by saying so.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Thanks to you guys and girls who read my stuff, too. May you have long days and pleasant nights.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“That above all else. They did not look out their windows. No matter what noises or dreadful possibilities, no matter how awful the unknown, there was an even worse thing: to look the Gorgon in the face.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“That had to be the answer. When you heard hoof beats, you didn’t think zebras.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die. —H. P. Lovecraft”
Stephen King
Revival
“That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human lives by accepting the will of the universe”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“That morning he had awakened next to his wife, and had eaten breakfast across from his son. They talked about stuff, like people do. We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.”
Stephen King
Revival
“That smile was dangerous, she thought – a quicksand smile if ever there was one. Easy to wander in; perhaps more difficult to wander back out.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“That was also true of Morris Bellamy, a crazy literature buff who had killed his favorite writer.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“That was the hurtful part of motherhood, not being able to fix what you couldn’t understand.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“That was what I wanted, but I don’t need it to be gone. I can love you and I can love life and bear the pain all at the same time. I think the pain might even make the rest better, the way a good setting can make a diamond look better.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“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.”
Stephen King
Revival
“That’s me, Brady thought happily. When they give your middle name, you know you’re an authentic boogeyman.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“That’s really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures—it’s the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“That’s the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“The audience burst into applause and hallelujahs. I kept trying to make sense of it, and kept coming up short. Here were people who routinely used their computers to stay in touch with their friends and get the news of the day, people who took weather satellites and lung transplants for granted, people who expected to live lives thirty and forty years longer than those of their great-grandparents. Here they were, falling for a story that made Santa and the Tooth Fairy look like gritty realism.”
Stephen King
Revival
“The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The battle-fire had dropped over him, burning him everywhere with its righteous heat, sizzling his sight, frying his synapses and roasting his heart in its holy glow.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“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.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“The best thing about being old is you don’t have to worry about dieing young.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The Black Angel came up from the roots and down from the branches. Her fingers are death and her hair is full of cobwebs and dream is her kingdom.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its ground and fight until it can fight no more.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“The brain doesn’t age, although its ideas about the world may harden and there’s a greater tendency to run off at the mouth about how things were in the good old days.”
Stephen King
Revival
“The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“The country is an amazing paradox. In other lands, when a man eats to his fullest day after day, that man becomes fat…sleepy…piggish. But in this land…it seems the more you have the more aggressive you become.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The crazy people of the world…shouldn’t get to win. If God won’t make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“The crowd had the plump, righteous, slightly constipated look that seems the exclusive province of businessmen who belong to the GOP.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“The dead also do not see, unless they look from a brighter place than this darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“The dead are orphans. No company but the silence like a moth’s wing. An end to the agony of movement, to the long nightmare of going down the road. The body in peace, stillness, and order. The perfect darkness of death.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“The devil was unpredictable. He had been an angel once.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“The dream didn’t fade as dreams usually do upon waking.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood’s dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The fears of children were simpler and usually more powerful. The fears of children could often be summoned up in a single face… and if bait were needed, why, what child did not love a clown?”
Stephen King
It
“The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“The first real terror struck him then, and there was nothing supernatural about it. It was only a realization of how easy it was to trash your life. That was what was so scary. You just dragged the fan up to everything you had spent the years raking together and turned on.”
Stephen King
It
“The future was cloudy, but tonight the moon was bright.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“The good thing about being old, is you don’t have to worry about dying young.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but Size.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“The guy was tall, and possessed one of those earnest faces Henry associated with middle management.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“The hardest for man is lie to himself between 3:00 and 6:00 in the morning.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“The house was full of dusty late-afternoon sunlight and silence. But it did not feel like unoccupied silence.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“The imitation lives we see on TV and in the movies whisper the idea that human existence consists of revelations and abrupt changes of heart; by the time we’ve reached full adulthood, I think, this is an idea we have on some level come to accept. Such things may happen from time to time, but I think that for the most part it’s a lie. Life’s changes come slowly…the whole idea of curious cats attaining satisfaction seemed slightly absurd. The world rarely finishes its conversations.”
Stephen King
From a Buick 8
“The Internet is a bright house standing above a dark cellar with a dirt floor. Falsehoods sprout like mushrooms in that cellar.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you.”
Stephen King
It
“The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money.”
Stephen King
Black House
“The ladder had always held us before; we thought it would always hold us again, which is a philosophy that gets men and nations in trouble time after time.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“The lesson is that you’re just an animal in a cage, no more than that, no better than that.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“The lessons which I remember the longest are always the ones that are self-taught”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“The longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“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”
Stephen King
The Stand
“The loss of memory isn’t always the problem; sometimes–maybe even often–it’s the solution.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“The mad King, the bad King, the sad King. Ring-a-ding-ding, all hail the King!”
Stephen King
Black House
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“The man who senses the wind of change should build not a windbreak but a windmill.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“The most basic rule of human discourse: when someone says they’re going to be honest with you, they are in most cases preparing to lie faster.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“The Mr. Sunshine who’d sat beside his ex at the dinner table disappeared. Mr. Gonna Rain A Bitch took his place.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“The multiple choices of possibilities of daily life are the music we dance to.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“The mystery of the universe is not time but size.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“The night was cold, chilling the sweat on his face, but the air was as sweet and crisp as the first bite of a fall apple. Above him was a half-moon and what seemed like a trillion stars.
Stephen King
Elevation
“The only religions I don’t like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God.”
Stephen King
Duma Key
“The over-all impression is one of a town that is waiting to die. It is not enough, these days, to say that Chamberlain will never be the same. It may be closer to the truth to say that Chamberlain will simply never again be.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“The pain wasn’t tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there.”
Stephen King
Misery
“The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there…and still on your feet.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“The proverb says revenge is a dish best eaten cold, but Ronson Fast-Lite had yet to be invented when they made that one up.”
Stephen King
Misery
“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.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“The record changer clicked; another record dropped down. In the sudden, brief silence, she heard something within her turn over. Perhaps only her soul.
Stephen King
Carrie
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“The Roman satirist, Juvenal, who had said that if you gave the people bread and circuses, they’d be happy and not cause any trouble.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“The sandwich he made was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages of being single.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“The shining. It was a good name, a comforting name, because she had always thought of it as a dark thing.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“The silence was a comfortable one, as if they had known each other for a long time. This was a feeling about which Louis had read in books, but which he had never experienced until now.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“The silence wasn’t uncomfortable or hostile but exhausted–the quiet of people who have a great deal to think about but not a hell of a lot to say.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“The sleep of reason breeds monsters.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“The snake said nothing in return. Snakes do not need to justify their behavior.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis. A man grows what he can, and he tends it. ‘Cause what you buy, is what you own. And what you own… always comes home to you.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“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.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“The stench in the air grew steadily stronger, and the dark about us seemed to press like wool, as if jealous of the light which had temporarily deposed it after so many years of undisputed dominion.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west blask-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night has burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“The sun loses its thin grip on the air first, turning it cold, making it remember that winter is coming and winter will be long.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind men of us all.”
Stephen King
Black House
“The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“The terror, which would not end for another 28 years-if it ever did end-began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”
Stephen King
It
“The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real. I know that, and I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“The things of the world fell by the wayside, you lost your speed and your eyesight and your Electric Boogaloo, but literature was eternal.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“The thought that grieving for a fictional character was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course.”
Stephen King
Misery
“The town cares for devil’s work no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn’t like to be alone even for a little while-was that the longer you lived alone, the louder the voices on the right side of your brain got.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“The truth was often like that, he thought—a bleary circle of light behind clouds.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“The university was safe. It was a kind of never-never land where everybody, even the teachers, could be a part of Peter Pan’s band and never grow up. And there would always be a Nixon or an Agnew to play Captain Hook.”
Stephen King
The Dead Zone
“The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“The way things should be and the way things are hardly ever get together.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time’s great tower, everything was still happening.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“The wheel which turns our lives is remorseless; always it comes around to the same place again.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“The wheels of progress; sooner or later they took you back to where you started from.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“The work, the pride in your work, the worth of the work itself…all those things faded away to the magic-lantern shades they really were when the pain got bad enough.”
Stephen King
Misery
“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“The world has a way of keeping things in balance.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“The world is a worst case scenario and I’m afraid that all you sense is true”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“The world is hard and you can’t have everything.”
Stephen King
Revival
“The world turns, that’s all. You can hold on and turn with it, or stand up to protest and be spun right off.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“The world was the Overlook Hotel, where the party never ended. Where the dead were alive forever.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“The world, although well-lighted with fluorescents and incandescent bulbs and neon, is still full of odd dark corners and unsettling nooks and crannies.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“The world’s most brilliant confabulators are in asylums.”
Stephen King
Revival
“The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love them all alone. Sometimes it seems like it’s only the bad people who stay healthy and prosper. The world don’t love you, but your momma does and so do I.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“The year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon- the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the night milk of fantasy.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Their faces were zealously blank, their eyes filled with bland fire.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“Their respect for the mystery–the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there is no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone’s story.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Then he closed his eyes and put his hands together again before his face, finger to finger. Johnny was struck by the kid’s lack of pretension. There was a simplicity about the gesture that had been honed by use into beauty.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Desperation
“Then his lids closed slowly over his slightly bloodshot eyes, and Mort Rainey, who had yet to discover what true horror was all about, fell asleep.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a standing O, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finished reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“There are all sorts of dream interpretations, Freud’s being the most notorious, but I have always believed they served a simple eliminatory function, and not much more – that dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“There are great drifting theatre curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn’t it exactly. She thinks no one has ever named the shade she’s seeing.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.”
Stephen King
Misery
“There came a time when you realised that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“There had never been a shortage of fools in the world”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the great divisions of the human race.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“There is a skull in every man, and I tell you there is a skull in the lives of all men. They saw it that day, those men. They saw what sometimes grins behind the smile.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“There may be fairies, there may be elves, but God helps those who help themselves.”
Stephen King
Misery
“There was a beautiful feeling of calm in my groin, a sense of peace so remarkable it was almost ecstasy—anyone who’ suffered bad pain and then recovered will know what I’m talking about.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“There was a momentary added weight in my stomach, almost like a sickness. There’s a name for that sort of sickness. I think it’s called falling in love with your best friend’s girl.”
Stephen King
Christine
“There was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to rise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“There was an ocean above us, held in by a thin sac that might rupture and let down a flood at any second.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“There was murder, there was rape, there were unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, the bloody myth, for the grail, for the Tower.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“There were games and activities as well as sermons, because, as he pointed out regularly, most of Jesus’s preaching happened outside, and that meant there was more to Christianity than church.”
Stephen King
Revival
“There were no stars, but he could still make out the moon behind the clouds that were moving in. The truth was often like that, he thought—a bleary circle of light behind clouds. Sometimes it broke through; sometimes the clouds thickened, and the light disappeared completely.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“There were other people here with at least some shreds of decency left, but working in a place like this destroyed your moral compass.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them… and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.”
Stephen King
Needful Things
“There were three churches, one Methodist, two off-brand, all of the come-to-Jesus variety.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“There’s a big difference between being good at what you do and being smart about what you KNOW… Give yourself some time to grow up. And stop being your own jury.”
Stephen King
The Tommyknockers
“There’s a crying shortage of pretty things in the slam, and the real pity of it is that a lot of men don’t even seem to miss them.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“There’s a door in the wall. The door is covered with ivy. The ivy is dead. She waits.”
Stephen King
Revival
“There’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“There’s no tonic like an old friend.”
Stephen King
Revival
“There’s three things ye can do in any situation, girl,” her father had told her once. “Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing… or ye can decide not to decide.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“There’s a lot of things people think they can’t do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“There’s no room for anything but joy and fear, and joy ruled the house. Fear lived in the shack out back!”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“There’s nothing I like better than a good book discussion with someone who can hold up his end of the argument.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“There’s… a force for good in the world. That’s something else I believe. Partly so I don’t go crazy when I think of all the awful things that happen, I guess, but…also…well the evidence seems to bear it out, wouldn’t you say? Not just here but everywhere. There’s some force that tries to restore the balance.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“They are surprised that he did it, though, which shows you that the male mind expects very little in the way of altruism from it’s fellows.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“They ate as they came, rolling up narrow strips of the world.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“They got that way, Garraty had noticed. Complete withdrawal from everything and everyone around them. Everything but the road. They stared at the road with a kind of horrid fascination, as if it were a tightrope thay had to walk over an endless, bottomless chasm.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school’s relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“They lived in fearful perplexity and passed it off as imagination”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“They say half a loaf is better than none, Jimmy, but in a world of want, even a single slice is better than none.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“They stared at each other in the dark, frozen by the actual act as thought never could have done. Her very breath turned to glass in her throat. Then, inside, the laughter began.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“They walked back into the world together, wearing the gift that had been given them: just life. Pity was not love, Barbie reflected…but if you were a child, giving clothes to someone who was naked had to be a step in the right direction.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“They walked on, somehow in step, although all three of them were bent forever in different shapes by the pains that pulled them.”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“They watched without talking, each in his own way exploring the edges of the hole that had appeared in their lives, so as not to fall in.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“They were trying to run, trying to hide. But the rock would not hide them; the dead tree gave no shelter.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“They’re animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“Things come in three major degrees in the human experience, I think. There’s good, bad, and terrible. And as you go down into progressive darkness towards terrible, it gets harder and harder to make subdivisions.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even if they try their best to be identical, because they’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“Things were going very fast now. Too fast to suit him. Fantasy and reality had merged.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“Thinking that if a person did begin considering supernatural possibilities, that person would no longer be able to think of himself as a completely sane person, and thinking about one’s sanity was maybe not a good thing. It was like thinking about your heartbeat: if you had to go there, you might already be in trouble.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“This inhuman place makes human monsters.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know—by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there’s still time.”
Stephen King
Revival
“This is the girl they keep calling a monster. I want you to keep that firmly in mind. The girl who could be satisfied with a hamburger and a dime root beer after her only school dance so her momma wouldn’t be worried.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a gasp.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“This is what romance gets you–a noose around your neck and a crazy woman with two guns somewhere behind you.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“This life we think we’re living isn’t real. It’s just a shadow play, and I for one will be glad when the lights go out on it. In the dark, all the shadows disappear.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“This man saw women like her all the time, women hiding behind dark glasses, women buying tickets to different time zones, women who looked as if they had forgotten who they were somewhere along the way, and what they thought they were doing, and why.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“This second type of guy knows there’s no harm in hoping for the best as long as you’re prepared for the worst.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Thomas Ross appears to have been something of a rarity: a socially conscious young man.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Those in the grip of a strong drug – heroin, devil grass, true love – often find themselves trying to maintain a precarious balance between secrecy and ecstasy as they walk the tightrope of their lives. Keeping one’s balance on a tightrope is difficult under the soberest of circumstances; doing so while in a state of delirium is all but impossible.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Those who do not learn the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“Thought only gives the world an appearance of order to anyone weak enough to be convinced by its show. Colin Wilson “The Country of the Blind”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Three heavy blows boxed him low in the back. He saw a splash of red hit the door and had time to think, ‘We should have remembered the body armor.’ Then he crumpled, still holding onto the knob with one hand as the world rushed away from him. Everything he was and everything he’d ever known diminished to a single burning-bright point of light. Then it went out. His hand slipped off the knob. He died on his knees, leaning against the door.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“Thud, thud, thud, rider less black horse with red eyes coming down the halls of his mind, iron shod hooves digging up soft gray clouds of brain tissue, leaving hoof prints to fill up with mystic crescents of blood.”
Stephen King
Firestarter
“Time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“Time continued to pass – the oldest trick in the world, and maybe the only one that really is magic.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Time had passed, and time probably did heal all wounds, but God, some of them healed so slowly. And the difference between I have and I had was such a gulf.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Time healed all wounds. Of course, as some wag had pointed out, it also wounds all heels.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“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?”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Time takes it all, whether you want it 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.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Time’s passage was a mystery, but it was a normal mystery.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“To fully understand about hugging, maybe you had to have missed a lot of it.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“To him those last few crumbs, sucked slowly onto the tongue from between the tines of the fork, always seemed like the sweetest part of the slice.
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“To match the trillion pebbles, just as mysterious, that we walk over every day, he thought.” Mystery above, mystery below. Weight, mass, reality: mystery all around.”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Tough old world, baby. If you’re not bolted together tightly, you’re gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring — once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome… except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Trump and his cronies took it all back. They understand culture no more than a donkey understands algebra.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Truth was sometimes not the same as reality—this was one of the certainties that lived in the hollow, cavey place at the center of his divided nature.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Try not to think of a polar bear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, and you will see the cursed thing come to mind every minute.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“Twenty-five, maybe even thirty dollars a week, half of it just for reading, which was something I would have done for free!”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead,”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday’s T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early — it’s summer vacation, after all — and Tyler can’t seem to make him understand that every day is important, especially those filled with warmth and sunlight and no particular responsibilities. It’s as if there’s some little voice deep inside him, warning him not to waste a minute, not a single one, because time is short.”
Stephen King
Black House
“Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers’ money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There’s no feeling on earth like it.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“Was it God that made magic, or was it magic that made God?”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“We all die in time,” the gunslinger said. “It’s not just the world that moves on.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“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
The Dead Zone
“We all remember our pleasant dreams more clearly than the scary ones.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H.G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.”
“We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end, we will stand.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“We did not ask for this room or this music. We were invited in. Therefore, because the dark surrounds us, let us turn our faces to the light. Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty. We have been given pain to be astounded by joy. We have been given life to deny death. We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“We have once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”
Stephen King
It
“We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.”
Stephen King
Revival
“We poor humans are wired up to always think the worst is gonna happen because it so rarely does.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“We rarely get what we imagine in this world.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“We sometimes need to create unreal monsters and bogies to stand in for all the things we fear in our real lives.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“We’d all be scared if we knew what was swept under the carpet of each other’s minds”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“We’re all dying. The world’s just a hospice with fresh air.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“Weird love’s better than no love at all.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“What an amazing day this has been, he thought. What a perfectly amazing day… and it’s not even one in the afternoon yet.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“What can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.”
Stephen King
It
“What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“What good would that do had become another mantra, and he recognized it was a bad way to think, a step down the path to acceptance of this place. He didn’t want to go there, no way did he want to go there, but logic was logic.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen.
Stephen King
Joyland
“What it comes down to, Red is some people refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That’s called sainthood, and the pigeons land on your shoulders and crap all over your shirt.”
Stephen King
Different Seasons
“What Jack didn’t understand was that no matter where he went, the same asshole got off the plane.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“What we’ve got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“What you love, you must love all the harder because someday it will be gone.”
Stephen King
Black House
“When a codependent is drowning, somebody else’s life flashes before his eyes.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“When all else fails, give up and go to the library.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.”
Stephen King
Bag of Bones
“When an old man dies, a library burns.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“When had men not been mystified by women? They were the magic that men dreamed of, and sometimes their dreams were nightmares.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“When he remembered to turn and look for it, the Talisman was gone.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“When it started not to hurt, it started not to matter.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“When nurses drink, they have a tendency to go all in. They’re like cops that way.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“When someone says they’re going to be honest with you, they are in most cases preparing to lie faster than a horse can trot.”
Stephen King
Finders Keepers
“When the dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.”
Stephen King
Under the Dome
“When the mind’s filter disappeared, the big picture disappeared with it. There was no forest, only trees. At its worst, there were no trees, either. Just bark.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. I was your teacher.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“When there’s no more room in hell, this artifact said, the dead will walk the earth.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
The Regulators
“When we grow up, concepts gradually get easier and we leave the images to the poets”
Stephen King
The Shining
“When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren’t a character in some writer’s story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe’s head, or a momentary mote in God’s eye?”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“When you couldn’t sleep, when you were afraid to look around because of what you might see, time elongated and grew sharp teeth.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“When you gaze into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also gazes into you.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“When you get old, peace is about all you want.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“When you grew up in a no-stoplight, dirt-road town like Harlow, the outside world was a strange and tempting place, and you longed to touch it in a way network TV couldn’t match.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“When you lived in the funhouse, the laff riot just never stopped.”
Stephen King
Misery
“When you own a piano, it’s harder to think about moving.”
Stephen King
Misery
“When you planned rough, you allowed room for improvisation.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“When you spend your life taking care of mudmen, you can’t help getting a little dirty yourself.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the best of them, let alone the rest of them.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“When you want to feel better, call something a piece of shit. It usually works.”
Stephen King
Revival
“When you were trying to stay alive, you just saw what you had to see; the rest went by the board.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“When you’re little and it’s your mom, you say okay to everything. Unless she says it’s bedtime, of course. Or to finish your broccoli.”
Stephen King
Later
“When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re lost.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“Whenever anything important happens in America, they have to gold-plate it, like baby shoes. That way you can forget it.”
Stephen King
Carrie
“Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“While the road of good intentions might end in hell, the people who tried to fill the potholes along the way deserved at least some credit.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“Who can remember the pangs and sweetness of those early years? We remember our first real love no more clearly than the illusions that caused us to rave during a high fever.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
“Whoever said misery loves company was full of shit. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, however… that guy was onto something.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“Why feel bad about what you couldn’t change? Why not embrace it?”
Stephen King
Elevation
“Why’ is a crooked letter and can’t be made straight.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“Women are better at keeping secrets, but men are more comfortable with them.”
Stephen King
11/22/63
“Woody Allen was right: eighty percent of success is just showing up.”
Stephen King
Mr. Mercedes
“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“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.”
Stephen King
The Green Mile
“Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.”
Stephen King
Insomnia
“Would either of you like to tell me why you have arrested Flint City’s 2015 Man of the Year? Is it just a mistake, one we can perhaps smooth over, or have you lost your minds?”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Writers remember everything…especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar.
Stephen King
Misery
“Writing controlled fiction is called “plotting.” Buckling your seatbelt and letting the story take over, however…that is called “storytelling.” Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.”
Stephen King
‘Salem’s Lot
“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don’t have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“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?”
Stephen King
On Writing
“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…this book…is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“Writing may be masturbatory, but God forbid it should be an act off autocannibalism.”
Stephen King
Misery
“Writing, it seems to me, is a secret act—as secret as dreaming—and that was one aspect of this strange and dangerous craft I had never thought about much.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“You can’t have everything, she thinks; into every life a little poop must fall. But sometimes you do get what you need. Which is really all a sane person can ask for.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.”
Stephen King
The Gunslinger
“You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“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?”
Stephen King
Elevation
“You could get used to anything if you had to. She knew that now.”
Stephen King
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
“You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“You did yourself ill to feel well of those to whom ill must eventually be done.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“You didn’t get sober to be stupid, Danny. Keep it in mind the next time you start listening to that itty-bitty shitty committee inside your head.”
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“You didn’t have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if you never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing.”
Stephen King
Desperation
“You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up, what does it profit a man, it profits him nothing, it profits him zilch, and you don’t learn that in school, you learn it on the road, you learn it from Ferd Janklow, and Wolf, and Richard going head-first into the rocks like a Titan II that didn’t fire off right.”
Stephen King
The Talisman
“You don’t always talk with your mouth. Sometimes what you say with your mouth hardly matters at all. You have to signify.”
Stephen King
From a Buick 8
“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.”
Stephen King
It
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Roland said, “but you’re going to find out.”
Stephen King
The Drawing of the Three
“You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism.”
Stephen King
Song of Susannah
“You get used to marvelous things. You take them for granted. You can try not to, but you do. There’s too much wonder, that’s all. It’s everywhere.”
Stephen King
Later
“You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.”
Stephen King
The Colorado Kid
“You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.”
Stephen King
Dreamcatcher
“You had to find your way into the head of the person you were after like some kind of tiny burrowing animal, and you had to keep listening for something that wasn’t a beat but a brainwave: not a thought, precisely, but a way of thinking.”
Stephen King
Rose Madder
“You have the right to remain silent,’ the big cop said in his robot’s voice. ‘If you do not choose to remain silent, anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. I’m going to kill you. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand your rights as I have explained them to you?”
Stephen King
Desperation
“You haven’t finished the key, but not because you are afraid to finish. You’re afraid of finding you can’t finish. You’re afraid to go down to where the stones stand, but not because you’re afraid of what may come once you enter the circle. You’re afraid of what may not come. You’re not afraid of the great world, Eddie, but of the small one inside yourself.”
Stephen King
The Waste Lands
“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.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“You know what they say, there are none so blind as those who will not see.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“You know, Jamieson, this life we think we’re living isn’t real. It’s just a shadow play, and I for one will be glad when the lights go out on it. In the dark, all the shadows disappear.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“You know, schizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It’s accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics.”
Stephen King
The Shining
“You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.”
Stephen King
Pet Sematary
“You never ever asked Lady Luck for a date; she had a way of standing men up just when they needed her most. But if she showed up on her own… well, it was wise to drop whatever it was you were doing and take her out and wine her and dine her just as lavishly as you could. That was one bitch who always put out if you treated her right.”
Stephen King
Four Past Midnight
“You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for… and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you.”
Stephen King
It
“You play the game to the end. That’s how it works; play to the end.”
Stephen King
End of Watch
“You really don’t believe Terry killed the Peterson boy?” “No more than I think Heath Holmes killed those two girls,” she said. “I think it was someone else. I think it was an outsider.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“You said ‘God is cruel’ the way a person who’s lived his whole life on Tahiti might say ‘Snow is cold’. You knew, but you didn’t understand.” He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy’s cold cheeks. “Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?”
Stephen King
Desperation
“You think just knowing about death will keep you from dying?”
Stephen King
The Long Walk
“You want to remember that while you’re judging the book, the book is also judging you.”
Stephen King
Night Shift
“You wondered why in the hell the world had been created in the first place. Good things were in short supply, and so much of the rest was downright rancid.”
Stephen King
Sleeping Beauties
“You’d be surprised what a person can live with,” Dan said.” (Stephen King Quotes)
Stephen King
Doctor Sleep
“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was.”
Stephen King
The Institute
“You’re smiling again,” Regina said. “I was just thinking about how much I love you both,” Arnie said. His father looked at him, surprised and touched; there was a soft gleam in his mother’s eyes that might have been tears. They really believed it.”
Stephen King
Christine
“Young artists are much more likely to be risk-takers, in my opinion.”
Stephen King
The Outsider
“Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got right on their side.”
Stephen King
Joyland
“Your first impulse is to share good news; your second is to club someone with it.”
Stephen King
The Stand
“Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
Stephen King
On Writing
“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.”
Stephen King
Lisey’s Story
“Youth is a wonderful thing,” said Mr. Harrigan. “What a shame it’s wasted on children.”
Stephen King
If It Bleeds
“You’ve called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility.”
Stephen King
Wizard and Glass
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