Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4)

by Stephen King

Jump in and let all these cares cease. There is no love of girls to worry you here, and no mourning of lost mothers to weigh your child’s heart. Only the hum of the growing cavity at the center of the universe; only the punky sweetness of rotting flesh. Come, gunslinger. Be a part of the thinny.

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.

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

“You’ve forgotten the face of your father, you scurrying little maggot,” Cuthbert said clearly.

Roland knows that often the voices that sound the most like our own when they speak in our heads are those of the most terrible outsiders, the most dangerous intruders.

“Oh Christ,” Eddie said. “I left the world I knew to watch a kid try to put booties on a fucked-up weasel. Shoot me, Roland, before I breed.”

“Kaka,” Roland replied, after a moment’s consideration. The three of them stared at him, mouths open. Roland of Gilead had made a joke.