Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4)

by Stephen King

Beyond the hospital, the city abruptly ended and the thinny began. To Eddie, it looked like flat water standing in a vast marshland. It crowded up to the raised barrel of I-70 on both sides, silvery and shimmering, making the signs and guardrails and stalled cars waver like mirages; it gave off that liquidy humming sound like a stench.

store-bought pussy tends to be overrated by the young,

Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn’t the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted.

All at once she could smell what her nose no longer noticed under ordinary circumstances: must and dust and a dirty mattress and the crumbs of food that had been consumed in bed; the mingled stench of ashes and ancient incense; the odor of an old woman with wet eyes and (ordinarily, at least) a dry pussy.

Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve.

“There’s three things ye can do in any situation, girl,” her father had told her once. “Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing . . . or ye can decide not to decide.” That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn’t needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools.

He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.

True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring—once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome . . . except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners. And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

The road, and the mysteries that lie along it, calls out to none as it calls to the young.

Time was a face on the water, and this time it was the face of her father.

Then ye can explain to Señor Lengyll why ye stood here using yer thumbs for fart-corks while Seafront burned down around yer ears!”

“You saw all that in the glass?” Alain asked in an awe-hushed voice. “I saw much.” “But not Susan Delgado,” Cuthbert said. “No. When we finish with yonder men and she finishes with Mejis, her part in our ka-tet ends. Inside the ball, I was given a choice: Susan, and my life as her husband and father of the child she now carries . . . or the Tower.” Roland wiped his face with a shaking hand. “I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. We must go . . . and we will go.” Above his young and unlined cheeks, below his young and unlined brow, were the ancient killer’s eyes that Eddie Dean would first glimpse in the mirror of an airliner’s bathroom. But now they swam with childish tears. There was nothing childish in his voice, however. “I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else—she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower.”

The sign on this door wasn’t from the movie, and only Susannah knew it was from Dante. ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE, it said.

Roland stands where he is, the smoking guns in his hands, his face cramped in a grimace of surprise and horror, just beginning to get the truth of what he must carry with him the rest of his life: he has used the guns of his father to kill his mother.