Finders Keepers (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #2)

by Stephen King

Better to die raging than to do so cringing and begging.

And he sometimes felt that, as the older kid, he had a responsibility to listen.

He felt that if you didn’t have hopes and ambitions when you were a teenager, you’d be pretty much fucked later on.

Well here we are lol

Many writers have been stupid and improvident about money.

Victim blaming

saying that all good things must end, which implied the converse was also true: bad things must end, too.

“You and Jimmy Gold will get along. He’s a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you.”

Ohhh this is why

For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers—not just capable of doing it (which Morris already knew), but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten,

A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.”

What you need to see—what Rothstein finally saw, although it took him three books to do it—is that most of us become everyone.

Hunger is a sign of health.

Hodges sees he’s not handsome at all. Or ugly, for that matter. He’s nobody, extra tall or not, and that’s how he’s gotten by as long as he has, pulling one scam after another,

Drew thinks there’s nothing more terrifying than boys of seventeen. You have absolutely no idea what they’ll do.

Alea iacta est. The die is cast.

Is that paranoid or smart?

They say half a loaf is better than none, Jimmy, but in a world of want, even a single slice is better than none.

There are none so blind as those who will not see,

He did it out of his own core belief: that the writing was somehow more important than the writer.

“No. I was going to say his work changed my life, but that’s not right. I don’t think a teenager has much of a life to change. I just turned eighteen last month. I guess what I mean is his work changed my heart.”