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Ullman was going to have his say, every last word of it.
“Then the place really isn’t cut off.” Mr. Ullman looked pained. “Suppose your son or your wife tripped on the stairs and fractured his or her skull, Mr. Torrance. Would you think the place was cut off then?”
“It’s a slang term for the claustrophobic reaction that can occur when people are shut in together over long periods of time. The feeling of claustrophobia is externalized as dislike for the people you happen to be shut in with. In extreme cases it can result in hallucinations and violence—murder has been done over such minor things as a burned meal or an argument about whose turn it is to do the dishes.”
the Overlook. It is a great hotel. I want it to stay that way.”
Jack and his pride!
She thought that to children adult motives and actions must seem as bulking and ominous as dangerous animals seen in the shadows of a dark forest. They were jerked about like puppets, having only the vaguest notions why.
Lost your temper.
He stepped deliberately toward his three-year-old son,
He had whirled Danny around to spank him,
A clean sound with the past on one side of it and all the future on the other,
You lost your temper
“The boiler,” Watson announced.
The boiler and his temper
“She creeps,”
“Mr. Torrance, I’ve worked here all my life. I played here when I was a kid no older’n your boy in that wallet snapshot you showed me. I never seen a ghost yet.
You keep a good eye on your boy, Mr. Torrance. You wouldn’t want nothing to happen to him.”
It seemed best to wait alone for whatever might happen next.
he had been in constant terror that she would pluck the word from her brain and drag it out of her
squinched
John Daniel Torrance’s
A jar of wasps which when released would sting deeply.
“Poison,” Tony said from the floating darkness. “Poison.”
a dreamy terror floated into the dark hollows of his body like light brown spores that would die in sunlight.
These days he almost always listened to what his pride
his pride was all that was left. The only thing that was his.
His temper was like a vicious animal on a frayed leash. He had left the house in terror that he might strike them.
He had tried to soothe the baby and dropped him on the floor.
And was she not holding her husband right? Why else would he take his joy out of the house?
life when there was nothing physically wrong.
He had a bad temper,
He was like a man who had leaned around a corner and had seen an unexpected monster lying in wait, crouching among the dried bones of its old kills.
in the strict meaning of that word: a kind of undefined superstitious dread.
and then she felt something being taken from her. It was a clear and distinct feeling, one she would never forget—the thing taken.
And hadn’t she felt, time and time again, her son’s wordless opposition to the whole idea of divorce?
Ew. Go clean up
that if their three/oneness was to be destroyed, it would not be destroyed by any of them but from outside.
With its hooded top and motionless stance, the streetlight looked like a monster in a space show.
They were beautiful mountains but they were hard. She did not think they would forgive many mistakes.
(They creep,
the restaurant, studying the view. He looked rapt and dreamy.
Wendy had a vision of the four of them being trapped between floors like flies in a bottle and found in the spring… with little bits and pieces gone… like the Donner Party… (Stop it!)
and the words echoed down a long and silent corridor in his mind, a corridor lined with mirrors where people seldom looked.
Ullman touched it bloodlessly. His pinky ring caught the lobby’s electric lights in a baleful sort of wink.
The Torrance family stood together on the long front porch of the Overlook Hotel as if posing for a family portrait,
It gave Jack a curious shrinking feeling, as if his life force had dwindled to a mere spark while the hotel and the grounds had suddenly doubled in size and become sinister, dwarfing them with sullen, inanimate power.
the roadblock had disappeared under his fingers as magically as cotton candy dissolves on the lips.
Now it looked as if she might actually get the play. Whether or not it was any good or if it would ever see actual production was another matter. And he didn’t seem to care a great deal about those things. He felt in a way that the play itself, the whole thing, was the roadblock,
He now thought that part of his drinking problem had stemmed from an unconscious desire to be free of Stovington and the security he felt was stifling whatever creative urge he had.
or strength of his own character. There was a broken switch somewhere inside, or a circuit breaker that didn’t work, and he had been propelled down the chute willy-nilly, slowly at first, then accelerating as Stovington applied its pressures on him. A big greased slide and at the bottom had been a shattered, ownerless bicycle and a son with a broken arm. Jack Torrance in the passive mode.
Football had provided a partial safety valve,
Gotta knock down the pressure. She creeps
about on the sloping roof seventy feet above the ground, not knowing where you were going, not remembering that your panicky, stumbling feet could lead you crashing and blundering right over the rain gutter and down to your death on the concrete seventy feet below? Jack didn’t think you could. 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
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