Different Seasons: Four Novellas

by Stephen King

Shawshank is a busy place during the work-week—deliveries in, deliveries out. We have the license-plate factory, and a big industrial laundry that does all the prison wetwash, plus that of Kittery Receiving Hospital and the Eliot Nursing Home. There’s also a big automotive garage where mechanic inmates fix prison, state, and municipal vehicles—not to mention the private cars of the screws, the administration offices… and, on more than one occasion, those of the parole board.

the amount of expert financial help an individual or company needs rises in direct proportion to how many people that person or business is screwing.

He had a Bible quote for every occasion, did Mr. Sam Norton, and whenever you meet a man like that, my best advice to you would be to grin big and cover up your balls with both hands.

Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.

Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Beefaroni, Rice-a-Roni, Noodle Roni. You can bet that whatever the old folks of America, the ones on fixed incomes, are eating tonight, it almost certainly ends in roni.

It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.

“I live now on stock dividends,” his voice came back. “Stocks I picked up after the war under yet another name. Through a bank in the State of Maine, if you please. The banker who bought them for me went to jail for murdering his wife a year after I bought them… life is sometimes strange, boy, hein?”

“Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.”

‘There will be water if God wills it, and we will find it if God wills it, and we will drink it if God wills it.’ What happens is not up to us.”

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out.

“Those stories you tell, they’re no good to anybody but you, Gordie. If you go along with us just because you don’t want the gang to break up, you’ll wind up just another grunt, makin C’s to get on the teams. You’ll get to High and take the same fuckin shop courses and throw erasers and pull your meat along with the rest of the grunts. Get detentions. Fuckin suspensions. And after awhile all you’ll care about is gettin a car so you can take some skag to the hops or down to the fuckin Twin Bridges Tavern. Then you’ll knock her up and spend the rest of your life in the mill or some fuckin shoeshop in Auburn or maybe even up to Hillcrest pluckin chickens. And that pie story will never get written down. Nothin’ll get written down. Cause you’ll just be another wiseguy with shit for brains.”

The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality; that’s why all the verbs in stories have -ed endings, Keith my good man, even the ones that sell millions of paperbacks. The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.

Birth is wonderful, gentlemen, but I have never found it beautiful—not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe it is too brutal to be beautiful. A woman’s womb is like an engine. With conception, that engine is turned on. At first it barely idles… but as the creative cycle nears the climax of birth, that engine revs up and up and up. Its idling whisper becomes a steady running hum, and then a rumble, and finally a bellowing, frightening roar. Once that engine has been turned on, every mother-to-be understands that her life is in check. Either she will bring the baby forth and the engine will shut down again, or that engine will pound louder and harder and faster until it explodes, killing her in blood and pain.

In the course of my reading on the subject of pregnancy, I discovered the principle of the silent birth and the idea of the Breathing Method. Screaming wastes energy which would be better used to expel the baby, it causes the woman to hyperventilate, and hyperventilation puts the body on an emergency basis—adrenals running full blast, respiration and pulse-rate up—that is really unnecessary. The Breathing Method was supposed to help the mother focus her attention on the job at hand and to cope with pain by utilizing the body’s own resources.

It was used widely at that time in India and Africa; in America, the Shoshone, Kiowa, and Micmac Indians all used it; the Eskimos have always used it; but, as you may guess, most Western doctors had little interest in it. One of my colleagues—an intelligent man—returned the typescript of my pregnancy pamphlet to me in the fall of 1931 with a red line drawn through the entire section on the Breathing Method. In the margin he had scribbled that if he wanted to know about “nigger superstitions,” he would stop by a newsstand and buy an issue of Weird Tales

I had packed forceps in my bag that night; I don’t know why. I hadn’t used such things in three years, not since I had seen a doctor I will not name punch through a newborn’s temple and into the child’s brain with one of those infernal gadgets. The child died instantly. The corpse was “lost” and what went on the death certificate was stillborn