The Stand

by Stephen King

Hiyo Silver, away.

Show me a man or 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.

‘Not just us. Someone else. Someone who came out of the twister.’

Shitting my pants

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.

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 … or change.

Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.

Wish-I-may, wish-I-might, have-the-wish-I-wish-tonight. Drop dead, folks.

If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.

‘When Moses smashed the golden calf, the Israelites stopped worshipping it. When a flood inundated the temple of Baal, the Malachites decided Baal wasn’t such a hot god anyway. But Jesus has been out to lunch for two thousand years, and people not only still follow His teachings, they live and die believing He’ll come back eventually, and it will be business as usual when He does.

Next time you go housebreaking, Frances Rebecca, remember to wear your continence pants.

(and Kojak lived another sixteen years, long after Glen Bateman died),

Don't I'm crying

The Ridiculous Thing

Insanely, it came to his mind to tell her to call him Hawk.

A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable.

Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sun-block is to the skin during the heat of the summer.

a goodly chunk of Tom Cullen’s attic insulation was missing.

‘Hail Mary, fulla grace, help me win this stock-car race.’

‘Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat,’

The penalty for disobedience was crucifixion.

But the wolves bored him now.

And who was going to end up with all this, if Nadine died? Who, if not his son?

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.

‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ he recited softly. ‘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.’

‘I will fear no evil,’

In his previous life, the life before Captain Trips when he had been Big Steve, he had ridden often in his master’s car. It was nice to be riding again, with his new masters.

Crying again

They definitely did not habla fucking español.

No habla español

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.