The Shining (The Shining, #1)

by Stephen King

If brains was black powder he couldn’t blow his own nose. It’s a pity the things you see when you ain’t got a gun.

“Say, you really are a college fella, aren’t you? Talk just like a book. I admire that, as long as the fella ain’t one of those fairy-boys. Lots of em are. You know who stirred up all those college riots a few years ago? The hommasexshuls, that’s who. They get frustrated an have to cut loose. Comin out of the closet, they call it. Holy shit, I don’t know what the world’s comin to.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong.

“You shine on, boy. Harder than anyone I ever met in my life. And I’m sixty years old this January.”

When you unwittingly stuck your hand into the wasps’ nest, you hadn’t made a covenant with the devil to give up your civilized self with its trappings of love and respect and honor. It just happened to you. Passively, with no say, you ceased to be a creature of the mind and became a creature of the nerve endings; from college-educated man to wailing ape in five easy seconds.

It was possible to graduate from passive to active, to take the thing that had once driven you nearly to madness as a neutral prize of no more than occasional academic interest.

(This inhuman place makes human monsters. This inhuman place) repeating the same incomprehensible thing over and over. (makes human monsters.)

Once, during the drinking phase, Wendy had accused him of desiring his own destruction but not possessing the necessary moral fiber to support a full-blown deathwish. So he manufactured ways in which other people could do it, lopping a piece at a time off himself and their family.

Inside its shell the three of them went about their early evening routine, like microbes trapped in the intestine of a monster.

Tough old world, baby. If you’re not bolted together tightly, you’re gonna shake, rattle, and roll before you turn thirty.

The Overlook was having one hell of a good time. There was a little boy to terrorize, a man and his woman to set one against the other, and if it played its cards right they could end up flitting through the Overlook’s halls like insubstantial shades in a Shirley Jackson novel, whatever walked in Hill House walked alone, but you wouldn’t be alone in the Overlook, oh no, there would be plenty of company here.

he looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.

The tears that heal are also the tears that scald and scourge.

That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on.”