The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower, #2)

by Stephen King

Then the lobstrosities would come out to ask their questions and look for shore dinners.

The trouble with him and Henry was they were like Charlie Brown and Lucy. The only difference was once in awhile Henry would hold onto the football so Eddie could kick it—not often, but once in awhile. Eddie had even thought, while in one of his heroin dazes, that he ought to write Charles Schultz a letter. Dear Mr. Schultz, he would say. You’re missing a bet by ALWAYS having Lucy pull the football up at the last second. She ought to hold it down there once in awhile. Nothing Charlie Brown could ever predict, you understand. Sometimes she’d maybe hold it down for him to kick three, even four times in a row, then nothing for a month, then once, and then nothing for three or four days, and then, you know, you get the idea. That would REALLY fuck the kid up, wouldn’t it?

They knew everything but could prove nothing. All the difference between world and want, his dear old mother would have said.

“Mustache Pete.”

He was a fat man who dressed like a peasant.

“God pisses down the back of your neck every day but only drowns you once,”

“It’s up to men to build things, paisan. It’s up to God to blow them down. You agree?”

If he had known how, he would have said: I looked at what he built, and to me it explained the stars.

At the same instant the gunslinger drew left-handed, and his draw was as it had always been, sick or well, wide awake or still half asleep: faster than a streak of blue summer lightning.

Later, with strange galaxies turning in slow gavotte overhead, neither thought the act of love had ever been so sweet, so full.

Might as well try to drink the ocean with a spoon as argue with a lover.

HERE THERE BE SARPENTS.

Detta’s mind might have been as ugly as a rat’s ass, but it was even quicker and sharper than Eddie’s.

God, no wonder he creamed his jeans!

Detta laid up in a deeply shadowed cleft formed by rocks which leaned together like old men who had been turned to stone while sharing some weird secret.

What neither understood was that, when you were dealing with the gunslinger, it was usually better to leave bad enough alone.

“Everything there is,” the gunslinger said calmly. “We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand.” Now it was Eddie who said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. Roland gently grasped Eddie’s arm. “Even the damned love,” he said.