The Stand

by Stephen King

sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

‘A lady’s hands proclaim her habits,’

A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can’t take care of it is a fool. You don’t hate him, but you got to pity him.’

‘Marriage or abortion,’ Peter Goldsmith said, and drew on his pipe. ‘He’s a regular two-gun Sam.’

There were the smells of dust and oil and pipesmoke, and it seemed to her now that there should be a rule: every father must smoke. Pipe, cigar, cigarette, marijuana, hash, lettuce leaves, something

‘I always told myself I didn’t do it because I don’t hold with hitting women. I still don’t. But when a person – man or woman – turns into a dog and begins to bite, someone has to shy it off.

Was it Newton who had said that somewhere, beyond the farthest star, there may be a body perfectly at rest?

But I doubt if this is God’s doing. I suspect He’ll keep right out of it as a consequence.’

Jess was just being Jess, trying to protect his image of himself to himself, the way all thinking people do so they can get to sleep at night.

He was … we were … in love … very much in love … love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought … it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down … bring them low … and make them crawl … we were … so much in love …’

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?

Him, it’s him, the Walkin Dude, the man with no face.

‘The beginning of a journey,’ she said, and then so softly he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly: ‘The way leads ever on …’

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.

when a man’s around a woman who doesn’t want him in bed, that man’s got his choice. I pick the hand every time.

(Nick reflected that Tom’s Jesus was a kind of Santa Claus in reverse, taking dead people up the chimney instead of bringing presents down).

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.

Well, he didn’t know about them, but fearless Inspector Underwood of Scotland Yard was afraid of the dreams … and if Nadine took a spill on the motorcycle, they might come back.

in those times the childhood fears of the night had faded a little and the adult fears that came in the night when everything is silent and you can hear the voice of your eternal soul, those fears were yet down the road. In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life. It seemed you would be forever young and that

‘I don’t know. It’s God’s way. He don’t explain to the likes of Abby Freemantle.’ ‘If this is His way,’ Ralph said, ‘why, I wish He’d retire and let somebody younger take over.’