Stephen King on Family

"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."

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

"It’s fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders. That must mean something, but I’m not sure what."

"You pay for what you get, you own what you pay for... and sooner or later whatever you own comes back home to you."

"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."

"According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, roughly 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States. Most are found. Thousands are not."

"Sweet Home Alabama, play that dead band's song."

"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's Official Web Site"

"But they always come back, she thought, looking at a sand beach she sometimes visited but where she would never live. They always come back and no matter how sloppy some things have become around here, they don't talk. That's one thing they are never sloppy about. Because if people found out what we're doing, the hundreds of children we've destroyed, we'd be tried and executed by the dozens. Given the needle like Timothy McVeigh."

"President Clinton has made a few feeble swipes at addressing this issue , but one can only gape at the unintentionally comic spectacle of this man chastising the gun-lobby and America's love of violent movies while he rains bombs on Yugoslavia, where at least twenty noncombatants have already died for every innocent student at Columbine High. It is like listening to a man with a crack-pipe in his hand lecture children about the evils of drugs."

"Harold, if you'll excuse me-" "But whatever can you be doing, my child?" The unreality was trying to creep back in again, and she found herself wondering just how much the human brain could be expected to stand before snapping like an overtaxed rubber band. My parents are dead, but I can take it. Some weird disease seems to have spread across the entire country, maybe the entire world, mowing down the righteous and the unrighteous alike- I can take it. I'm digging a hole in the garden my father was weeding only last week, and when it's deep enough I guess I'm going to put him in it- I think I can take it. But Harold Lauder in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac, feeling me up with his eyes and calling me "my child"? I don't know, my Lord, I just don't know."

"Please." He thought to say, Don't make me beg, but that was wrong because it wasn't enough. "I'm begging you. Please talk to me." She held up the cigarette and uttered a terrible toneless laugh. "I thought, now that the little lice are gone, I can have a smoke on my doorstep. And look, here's the big louse, the louse of louses. Last warning, Mr. Louse who got my husband killed. Get... the fuck... off my doorstep." "What if he didn't do it?" Her eyes widened and the pressure of her hand on the door slackened, at least for the moment. "What if he...? Jesus Christ, he told you he didn't do it! He told you as he lay there dying! What else do you want, a hand-delivered telegram from the Angel Gabriel?" "If he didn't, whoever did is still out there, and he's responsible for the destruction of the Peterson family, as well as yours." She considered this for a moment, then said: "Oliver Peterson is dead because you and that sonofabitch Samuels had to put on your circus. And you killed him, didn't you, Detective Anderson? Shot him in the head. Got your man. Excuse me, your boy." She slammed the door in his face. Ralph again raised his hand to knock, thought better of it, and turned away."

"Bob Palmer appeared again. "If you have children, ladies and gentlemen," he said quietly, "we would advise that you ask them to leave the room." A grainy shot of a truck backing down a pier jutting out over Boston Harbor, a big olive-covered army truck. Below it, riding uncertainly, was a barge covered with canvas tarps. Two soldiers, rugose and alien in gas masks, jumped down from the truck's cab. The picture jiggled and joggled, and then became steady again as they pulled back the canvas sheet covering the open rear end of the truck. Then they jumped up inside, and bodies began to cascade out onto the barge: women, old men, children, police, nurses; they came in a cartwheeling flood that never seemed to end. At some point during the film-clip it became clear that the soldiers were using pitchforks to get them out. Palmer went on broadcasting for two hours, his steadily hoarsening voice reading clippings and bulletins, interviewing other members of the crew. It went on until somebody on the ground floor realized that they didn't have to re-take the sixth floor to stop it. At 11:16, the WBZ transmitter was shut down permanently with twenty pounds of plastique. Palmer and the others on the sixth floor were summarily executed on charges of treason to their government, the United States of America."