You Like It Darker

by Stephen King

I remember thinking that the fading of hopes and ambitions was mostly painless. That was good, but it was also rather horrible. I wanted to be a writer, but I was beginning to think being a good one was beyond me. If it was, the world would continue to spin. You relaxed your hand… opened your fingers… and something flew away. I remember thinking maybe that’s all right.

“When intelligence outraces emotional stability, it’s always just a matter of time.”

I remembered the young man saying nothing can give you what isn’t already there. “It’s all right,” I said, and laughed a little. It wasn’t all right, it stung, but I understood the sting would go away. I’d go back to my life and the sting would go away. I had my famous father’s affairs to tie up, that would keep me busy, and I’d have plenty of money. Maybe I’d go to Aruba. It’s all right to want what you can’t have. You learn to live with it. I tell myself that, and mostly I believe it.

lack of belief is the curse of intelligence.

Love and hate are also twins.

If onlies are also rattlesnakes, I think. They are full of poison.

We worked at the relationship in a way that couples just starting out don’t need to do, because they have that wind beneath their wings. Older couples, especially those with a terrible darkness in their past that they need to avoid, have to flap. That’s what we did.

Grief sleeps but doesn’t die. At least not until the griever does.

I’m still in love with you and I hate you and I’m leaving before hate gets the upper hand.

Having your own mind turned against you is a gilt-edged invitation to insanity.

I didn’t even want the job or not want it. I wasn’t sick or anything, but I wasn’t a well man. You might understand that or you might not. Most nights I didn’t get much sleep and darkness is full of long hours. Most nights I fought the war and the war won. It’s an old story, I know. You can see it on television once a week.

She was living her life and did not believe it would end or even change. Blindness to possibility is either a blessing or a curse. You choose.

It’s part of growing up, he told himself. Yes, but the idea of choosing one single thing was abhorrent to him. He knew it had to be done, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Wasn’t it a little like picking the prison cell you wanted to spend your sentence in? Your life sentence? That was silly and overblown… yet it wasn’t.

Broken in. What a phrase! It had haunted him through all this spring and summer. It was what you did with horses. Broke them in, worked them until they became nags, then shipped them off to the glue factory. He felt the metaphor, while melodramatic, was also realistic.

Answers aren’t always painful, young man, but correct answers should never come cheap.”

Do you see what I mean about how easy it is to ask questions that don’t aid understanding? It devalues the whole process of asking, doesn’t it? Of delving into matters?”

Smart people labor under a dual disadvantage: they don’t know the answers they need, and they don’t know what questions to ask. Education doesn’t inculcate mental discipline. You’d think it would, but it’s often just the opposite.”

So the time passed, so the story was told. For the most part, it was good time. There were scars, but not disfiguring ones, and what were scars, after all, but wounds that had healed?

I’ve written about writers in my fiction, and I’ve written about the act of writing in nonfiction, but I still don’t understand it. I don’t even understand why people need stories, or why I—among many others—feel the need to write them. All I know is that the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind and bonding with people who don’t exist seems to be a part of almost every life. Imagination is hungry, and needs to be fed.