Revival

by Stephen King

those people who flow through every life like water through a sieve, seen once and never again.

But sometimes a person who fits none of these categories comes into your life. This is the joker who pops out of the deck at odd intervals over the years, often during a moment of crisis. In the movies this sort of character is known as the fifth business, or the change agent.

false enthusiasm does not come easily to six-year-olds…

When you want to feel better, call something a piece of shit. It usually works.

westering

But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.

I feel I could push aside the account I set out to write and instead fill a book—and not a small one—about those years and that world, which is so different from the one I live in now.

Youth was her makeup.

‘Thus-and-such is the elephant in the living room,’ meaning a thing that’s too big to be ignored, but you’d even ignore an elephant, if it was in the living room long enough.”

Religion is the theological equivalent of a quick-buck insurance scam, where you pay in your premium year after year, and then, when you need the benefits you paid for so—pardon the pun—so religiously, you discover the company that took your money does not, in fact, exist.”

I remember that moment as clearly as my first kiss, because the thought was an exotic stranger, utterly unconnected to anything that had been on my mind when I walked into Con’s room. I’d swear to it on a stack of Bibles. It wasn’t even like a thought. It was like a voice.

the love of my days and the eventually requited lust of my nights.

Keeping body and soul together is an annoying business, as I suppose you know.”

tell you the truth, I couldn’t understand why I’d trashed so much of my life over it in the first place. All that crazy need seemed like a dream to me. I wondered if everyone felt that way when their compulsions passed. I didn’t know.

“Something happened… TO YOU! Something happened… TO YOU! Something happened, dear Jamie, something happened TO YOU!

On the way home I remembered a bit of old folklore—probably you’ve heard it—about how to boil a frog. You put it in cold water, then start turning up the heat. If you do it gradually, the frog is too stupid to jump out. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I decided it was an excellent metaphor for growing old.

All that shit starts in E.

Home is where they want you to stay longer.

Then something happened.

Curiosity is a terrible thing, but it’s human.

The ivy is dead, and the branches look like grasping skeletal hands. The small door in the wall is hidden, Astrid was right about that, but it’s there. The voice comes from behind it, drifting through an ancient rusty keyhole.

Horrors beyond comprehension wait on the other side of that door. Not just the land of death, but the land beyond death, a place full of insane colors, mad geometry, and bottomless chasms where the Great Ones live their endless, alien lives and think their endless, malevolent thoughts.