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ONCE UPON A TIME we had a love affair with fire, the president of the United States thought as the match that he’d just struck to light his pipe flared beneath his fingers.
I love that he manages to start this story with "Once upon a time..."
Something that resembled a small, unblinking scarlet eye opened in the center of the flame, and he wanted to scream.
His face felt so tight he feared it would crack and fall to pieces like a mask, and he wouldn’t want to see what lay underneath.
The boy’s face was a study in sharp angles, like his mother’s; his nose, chin and cheekbones all seemed to be about to slice through his pallid skin, as if a second face were underneath the first and on the edge of being revealed.
Wait for it...
The man who liked movies laughed as if he were watching a comedy. In the sound of that laughter was the shriek of napalm bombs, incendiary rockets and Tomahawk missiles; it echoed through the theater, and if other people had been sitting there each one would have squirmed with the memory of a private terror.
Randall Flagg would be creeped out by this dude.
Washington was a lunar landscape of burning rubble, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution ashes in the shattered Archives building, the dreams of a million minds destroyed in the inferno of the Library of Congress. And it had happened so fast—so fast!
“Look around and tell me if you think those spindly bridges could survive what blew down the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building.”
Written well before 9/11 took down the towers without nukes.
He’d let the hamsters stay under until the bubbles stopped.
You're a hamster-murdering asshole.
A man had a certain look in his eyes when he was pushed against the wall and stripped of his humanity; his entire face changed, as if it was a mask cracking open to show the face of the real beast within.
Kempka’s black eyes bored into Roland’s, and finally a little smile flickered across his wet mouth. “Would these drugs,” he said, “buy me a sweet young space cadet?”
A fat pedo villain... Dude may as well be named Baron Harkonnen. I don't miss that homophobic trope.
“Yep. Everybody’s got two faces, child—the outside face and the inside face. The outside face is how the world sees you, but the inside face is what you really look like. It’s your true face, and if it was flipped to the outside you’d show the world what kind of person you are.”
“Do you believe in Jesus?” “Yes,” Josh managed to croak. “I do, too. I had a dog named Jesus once. I crucified him, but he didn’t come back to life. Before he died, he told me what to do to the people in the brick house. Off went their heads.”
Her eyes were the color of steel against her sallow, burn-blotched face. Paul realized that she was either the craziest or toughest mutha he’d ever met.
Maybe both.
The day before, Sister had gone to the Homewood Public Library and found the building deserted, most of the books gone, used as fuel in the fires that kept people alive.
Dick move, but I hope they started with Bill O'Reilly's books
“How’re you doing today?” the doctor asked Artie. “Did the nurse take your urine sample?” “Sure did!” Robot said, and he hooted. “Little fool’s got a cock that’d hang from here to Philly!”
Go on...
“There is no right and wrong in this world anymore,” he said. “There’s only a faster gun and a higher level of violence.”
“You dumb fool, what’s an orchard but one tree after another?”
“We’ve got us a printing press,” he said. “How about that? Must be an old knocker, but it’s in pretty good shape.”
Newspapers can survive a nuclear war but not the internet.
He said havin’ some kind of town newspaper would make everybody feel like more of a community.
Yes
She missed the stars. Without them, the sky was dead. Without them, what was there to make a wish on?
No, not good at all! First you had a printing press, and then you had a newspaper, and after that you had opinions and people thinking and wanting to do things, and then ...
The solution to things he did not understand was very simple: Destroy it.
It only had one room, and as insulation old newspaper and magazine pages had been nailed up all over the walls until there was no space not covered by yellowed headlines, type and pictures from a dead world.
Newspapers: Because good luck insulating your post-apocalypse shack with Reddit posts.
