Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

He turned her over. It took both hands to do it, and even then he had to work hard, kneeling and pushing and lifting there in the parking lot with the heat baking down from above and then bouncing back up from the asphalt. Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.

At night your thoughts have an unpleasant way of slipping their collars and running free.

‘Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,’ Hardy supposedly said, ‘the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.’

(there’s something creepy about any repeating dream, I think, about knowing your subconscious is digging obsessively at some object that won’t be dislodged),

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.

Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

Book-readers are just as willing as anyone else to start out with the weather, but as a general rule they can actually go on from there.

Nothing on the radio sounded right, all the music like screaming, and I turned it off.

It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

but any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

I found enough of her in those drawers to hurt my heart with a hundred unexpected memories,

Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning.

One look into those eyes and the war is over without a single shot fired; he belongs to her as surely as any young man ever belonged to any young woman.

My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business,

(in my family, the only permissible time to discuss trouble is when it’s over).

And then, afterward, we’d talk. Maybe until we could see the furniture in the first early light. When you’re in bed with someone you love, particularly for the first time, five o’clock seems almost holy.

getting right down to where the sweat forms in the crease and the heat gets hot and the pink comes glimmering through.

This is the between-time, I thought. When people talk about ‘slipping through the cracks,’ this is what they really mean. This is the place where they really go.

The falling-away of his face had finally begun, an indefinable something that makes the eyes look too big, the jaw too prominent, the mouth a bit loose. He looked old.

For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand.

Lightning flashed – the first stroke I had seen. It lit the western sky in a bright blue arc. Mattie trembled strongly in my arms – all the way from neck to toes she trembled. Her lips pressed together. Her brow furrowed, as if in concentration. Her hand came up and seemed to grab for the back of my neck, as a person falling from a cliff may grasp blindly at anything to hold on just a little longer. Then it fell away and lay limply on the grass, palm up. She trembled once more – the whole delicate weight of her trembled in my arms – and then she was still.