Joyland

by Stephen King

When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.

When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.

I’m not sure men know how to talk about women in any meaningful way.

“History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who’s destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”

the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people. I don’t know why that should be, I only know it is.

because unrequited love does have its attractions for young men.

But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.