The Talisman (The Talisman, #1)

by Stephen King

Jack had waited for her to backslide with that queer fatalism which is the flip side of childish credulity and innocence.

After all that had happened today (and it was not yet ten o’clock), sticking at blackberries in September seemed a little bit like refusing to take an aspirin after one has swallowed a doorknob.

His partner had never played to win, not seriously; he had been encumbered by sentimental notions of loyalty and honor, corrupted by the stuff you told kids to get them halfway civilized before you finally tore the blindfold off their eyes.

Pleasantness and even a remote sort of kindness did not preclude a cold interest in profits, or even something very close to outright greed.

that sort of fury, closely linked as it is to a sense of hopeless injustice, is perhaps never as strong as it is at twelve – college students sometimes think they feel it, but it is usually little more than an intellectual echo.

It had toughened him, all of that. But the toughening went deeper into the fiber of his essential self than something as simple and mindless as physical exercise could go.

they comforted each other as well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter experience, that is never quite good enough.

It looked as though it belonged in some kind of anti-Disneyland where Donald Duck had strangled Huey, Dewey, and Louie and Mickey shot Minnie Mouse full of heroin.

you could only express your ownership of a thing in terms of how freely you could give it up

Water spanked against the bow of a ship and a fish spanked the surface of a lake with the side of its body and a rainbow spanked the ground and a travelling boy spanked a drop of spittle to tell him which way to go and a spanked baby squinched its face and opened its throat; and there came the huge voice of an orchestra singing with its whole massive heart; and the room filled with the smokey trail of a single voice rising and rising and rising over all these forays of sound. Trucks jammed gears and factory whistles blew and somewhere a tire exploded and somewhere a firecracker loudly spent itself and a lover whispered again and a child squalled and the voice rose and rose and for a short time Jack was unaware that he could not see; but then he could again).