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

by Stephen King

The lobstrosity stopped working on the boot and raised its claws in that boxer’s pose.

He walked out of nowhere toward nowhere, a man from another time who, it seemed, had reached a point of pointless ending.

He lived in a world where paper and gold were valued in rough equivalency.

For another, he was Roland. If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland.

Flip-flop, hippety-hop, offa your rocker and over the top, life’s a fiction and the world’s a lie, so put on some Creedence and let’s get high.

But like they say, art imitates life and life imitates art.

I’ve eaten bugs while they were still lively enough for some of them to go running down my throat.

Because you may not love the candy-man, but you do love the candy, don’t you?

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

and so you finally fell into the pit of your own pride,

temps est poco-poco; tu est une grande peeparollo.”

“Io grande peeparollo; Io va fanculo por tu.” “None va fanculo, catzarro,”

She paused, telling herself she wouldn’t say the words that were crowding up her throat like bile,

her three days in Oxford, Mississippi had been a short season in hell.

He would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn’t tell her anything.

Eddie will be all right now. His brother is dead but he has someone else to take care of so Eddie will be all right now.

As it was, it sounded more like lyric than lecture.

“A lot of hard luck and a lot of soft living,”

he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching.

“What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common,

they were speaking to each other from separate islands. The water between was time.

It was uglier than the lobstrosities by far because of the greater intelligence which informed

she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?” “It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all.”

In one way they looked at it as they had looked at the evening star the previous night—which is to say, as children look at things—but

the improbable shadow of a scrawny giant tacked to the soles of his sneakers and stretching long yards to the east.

Sleep did not drift upon him as it sometimes did but seized him with the rough hands of a lover who is awkward in her eagerness.

Eddie tried to turn back to the slope, but Roland’s eyes held him nailed.

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

as the gunslinger approached like fated doom,

If you don’t answer my question, I am going to put your right thumb into your right eye. I’ll jam it in as far as it will go, and then I’ll pull your eyeball right out of your head and wipe it on the seat of this carriage like a booger.

The sea had eaten half the sun.

The thunder of his own guns filled him with stupid wonder.

“He taught me if you kill what you love, you’re damned.”