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

by Stephen King

But in the service of duty there was never any acceptable reason for denial.

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

You never see all that you see.

Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between living and dying.

The real problem is they felt something . . . and then forgot.

If you feel that little tickle, don’t do anything . . . but that includes not forgetting.

For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.”

What great wrong did you ever do that you should inspire such terrible loyalty in so many?

God doesn’t always dish it in your face, Roland thinks. Most times, but not always.

Fault always lies in the same place, my fine babies: with him weak enough to lay blame.

“What’s ka?” Eddie’s voice was truculent. “I never heard of it. Except if you say it twice you come out with the baby word for shit.” “I don’t know about that,” the gunslinger said. “Here it means duty, or destiny, or, in the vulgate, a place you must go.” Eddie managed to look dismayed, disgusted, and amused all at the same time. “Then say it twice, Roland, because words like that sound like shit to this kid.” The gunslinger shrugged. “I don’t discuss philosophy. I don’t study history. All I know is what’s past is past, and what’s ahead is ahead. The second is ka, and takes care of itself.”

The gunslinger could almost see him looking down into the drifty depths of his own damnation.

Stripped of jargon, what Adler said was this: the perfect schizophrenic—if there was such a person—would be a man or woman not only unaware of his other persona(e), but one unaware that anything at all was amiss in his or her life.

If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.

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

Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you, and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.

One of these men had been a creature the gunslinger believed to be a demon himself, a creature that pretended to be a man and called itself Flagg.

In matters of the Tower, fate became a thing as merciful as the lighter which had saved his life and as painful as the fire the miracle had ignited.

“We are going to go, Eddie. We are going to fight. We are going to be hurt. And in the end we will stand.”