Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4)

by Stephen King

“I cry your pardon, Eddie,” he said. “How the wheel of ka turns! Once I had to ask the same of my friend Cuthbert . . . and for the same reason. There’s a kind of blindness in me. An arrogant blindness.” “I hardly think there’s any need of pardon-crying,” Eddie said. He sounded uncomfortable. “There is. I held your jokes in contempt. Now they have saved our lives. I cry your pardon. I have forgotten the face of my father.” “You don’t need any pardon and you didn’t forget anybody’s face,” Eddie said. “You can’t help your nature, Roland.” The gunslinger considered this carefully, and discovered something which was wonderful and awful at the same time: that idea had never occurred to him. Not once in his whole life. That he was a captive of ka—this he had known since earliest childhood. But his nature . . . his very nature . . . “Thank you, Eddie.

“It’s possible, I suppose,” Roland said, “but on measure, I think not. My world is like a huge ship that sank near enough shore for most of the wreckage to wash up on the beach. Much of what we find is fascinating, some of it may be useful, if ka allows, but all of it is still wreckage. Senseless wreckage.” He looked around. “Like this place, I think.”

when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.

It was all right to feel fear, but sometimes a very bad idea to show it.

The following day, when the marketing took her to town, she had gone by the Travellers’ Rest, which, at eleven in the morning, had all the charm of something which has died badly at the side of the road.

Susan doubted if many of the Rest’s patrons would wake up feeling as well as Sheemie obviously did this morning . . . so who, when you came right down to it, was more soft-headed?

Roland began to cry. They were partly tears of gratitude, but mostly those of mingled shame and confusion; there was even a small, dark part of him that hated Cuthbert and always would. That part hated Cuthbert more on account of the kiss than because of the unexpected punch on the jaw; more for the forgiveness than the awakening.

“Are we going to kill her?” Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. “We should.” “Aye. We should. But are we going to?” “Not unless we have to, I reckon.” Later he would regret this decision—if it was a decision—bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall, and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. “Not unless she makes us.”