Stephen King on Life

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

"No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves."

"What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common...."

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

"We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why."

"We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living."

"She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time."

"Hearts can break. Yes. Hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't."

"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."

"And almost idly, in a kind of sidethought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought."

"Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are."

"Born in Lust, Turn to Dust. Born in Sin, Come on In"

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."

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

"I wouldn't have missed a single minute of it, Not for the whole world."

"You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that."

"Either get busy living or get busy dying"

"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why God? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off."

"They die and leave their wives their money. I should know, shouldn't I? Sometimes they're driving home from their mistress's apartment and their brakes suddenly fail. An accident, Delores, can be an unhappy woman's best friend."

"When I was a kid I believed everything I was told, everything I read, and every dispatch sent out by my own overheated imagination. This made for more than a few sleepless nights, but it also filled the world I lived in with colors and textures I would not have traded for a lifetime of restful nights."

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

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

"Go down, Jack. Get them and I'll take the cancer away. Oh, but right now he had more immediate concerns, didn't he? He was swelling up like a waterlogged sponge. The snakebite poison, too. I can make you well. Jack wasn't sure he could believe Tat-Man, but he understood he had no choice. Also, there was Anderson. Mr. No Opinion didn't get to walk away from this. It was all his fault, and he didn't get to walk away. He started down the path at a shambling trot, clutching the barrel of the Winchester and using the stock as a cane. His second fall came when the rocky scree slid away under his left foot and his swollen, throbbing right leg wasn't able to compensate. The leg of his pants split open the next time he went down, disclosing flesh that was turning purplish-black and necrotic. He clawed at the rocks and got to his feet again, his face puffing and running with sweat. He was pretty sure he was going to die on this godforsaken chunk of rock and weeds, but he was goddamned if he was going to do it alone."

"The darkness. Goddamn the darkness. It seemed to Garraty they had been buried alive in it. Immured in it. Dawn was a century away. Many of them would never see the dawn. Or the sun. They were buried six feet deep in the darkness. All they needed was the monotonous chanting of the priest, his voice muffled but not entirely obscured by the new-packed darkness, above which the mourners stood. The mourners were not even aware that they were here, they were alive, they were screaming and scratching and clawing at the coffin-lid darkness, the air was flaking and rusting away, the air was turning into poison gas, hope fading until hope itself was darkness, and above all of it the nodding chapel-bell voice of the priest and the impatient, shuffling feet of mourners anxious to be off into the warm May sunshine. Then, overmastering that, the sighing, shuffling chorus of the bugs and the beetles, squirming their way through the earth, come for the feast...I could go crazy, Garraty thought. I could go right the fuck off my rocker."

"In a book, all would have gone according to plan.... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of your 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?"

"No, of course victims of high-gamma radiation didn't turn transparent, like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man. They didn't start to lose inches as their bodies twisted and thickened. But yes, they were apt to lose teeth, their hair was apt to fall out - in other words, there was a kind of physical 'becoming' in both cases."

"I cried, all right. I sat there at my desk and I cried for her, for me, for both of us, for all of us. I can't remember hurting any more in my life than I did then. Hearts are tough, she said, most times hearts don't break, and I'm sure that's right … but what about then? What about who we were then? What about hearts in Atlantis?"

"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."

"Maybe, he thought, 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."

"Somebody had slipped. Either that, or the disease that Charles D. Campion had brought to Arnette was a lot more communicable than anyone had guessed. Either way, the integrity of the Atlanta Plague Center had been breached, and Stu thought that everyone who had been there was now getting a chance to do a little firsthand research on the virus they called A-Prime or the superflu. They still did tests on him here, but they seemed desultory. The schedule had become slipshod. Results were scrawled down and he had a suspicion that someone looked at them cursorily, shook his head, and dumped them in the nearest shredder. That wasn't the worst, though. The worst was the guns. The nurses who came in to take blood or spit or urine were how always accompanied by a soldier in a white-suit, and the soldier had a gun in a plastic Baggie. The Baggie was fastened over the wrist of the soldier's right gauntlet. The gun was an army-issue .45, and Stu had no doubt that, if he tried any of the games he had tried with Deitz, the .45 would tear the end of the Baggie into smoking, burning shreds and Stu Redman would become a Golden Oldie. If they were just going through the motions now, then he had become expendable. Being under detention was bad. Being under detention and being expendable... that was very bad."