Rose Madder

by Stephen King

Just that faint irritation in his voice is enough to renew her terror and fill her mouth with a steely taste.

never fully articulated to begin with—slips away as the knowledge of a rational waking world slips away in sleep;

The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.

head injury

For most of those years she existed in a daze so deep it was like death, and on more than one occasion she found herself almost certain that her life wasn’t really happening, that she would eventually awaken, yawning and stretching as prettily as the heroine in a Walt Disney animated cartoon.

A part of her mind—a habituated, cowed part

abuse! i have experienced this!!

She listened for the voice inside to raise its clamor again,

inner voice raising a clamor! i have such a voice!!!

Already she felt like a fugitive, and a terrible thought had begun to gnaw at her mind like a rat gnawing cheese:

naming BLT as my abuser gave me this feeling!!!

What she felt like was a tiny speck of flotsam in the middle of a trackless ocean.

“I’m looking for 251 Durham Avenue,” Rosie said. “It’s a place called Daughters and Sisters. I had directions, but I guess—” “What, the welfare lesbians? You ast the wrong chicken, baby girl. I got no use for crack-snackers. Get lost. The fuck outta here.”

ask for help, get treated like you did something wrong

They’re going to send you away, a voice whispered. They’ll send you away,

asking for help and being turned away...

By then Rosie felt a strange but welcome calm—the sort of calm one might feel in a recognized dream. She half-believed she was dreaming.

She was more than half convinced that, now that she had been fed and allowed a few hours’ sleep, she would be turned out onto the street again.

She wasn’t able to explain the complex feelings that spot had aroused in her, and she wasn’t able to admit to the anger she had felt—anger which had seemed simultaneously new and like an old friend—

“Pardon me, did you say up to eight weeks?” Dig out your ears, little lady, Anna Stevenson would say briskly. Days, I said—eight days. Do you think we’d let the likes of you stay here for eight weeks? Let’s be sensible, shall we?

after so many letdowns, having this kind of thought when you thought you heard something gloriously wonderful, is something i can identify with!

Her life wasn’t perfect, at least not yet, but it was better than she ever would have believed

Likke me

It was also wonderful to know what was coming next, and to feel sure it wasn’t going to include something sudden and painful.

Me!!!!

She sensed, however, that it would soon take more than his absence to satisfy and fulfill her. Not quite yet, though, she thought, and closed her eyes.

i feel like i can idebtify with this

These recollections possessed her mind wholly for a little while, as only our worst recollections can—

this is when people will often say to not dwell on a subject

Rosie stayed where she was, feeling the momentary dislocation and deep relief of someone who wakes from a really bad dream.

That his temper had a way of getting him in trouble and keeping him in trouble was also something he would have freely admitted.

It was like not saying out loud that niggers didn’t understand the concept of work, although everybody (everybody white, at least) knew it.

Why would steve put this in his book?

Some things call to us, that’s all. It’s as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads.

Or had privileged access to our minds to know how we think so that they can better persuade us

fear was an inadequate word to express her feelings about Norman during her first week or two at D & S; even terror didn’t completely serve, because the core of her feelings concerning him was lapped about—and to some degree altered—by other emotions:

the sort of relief a wire-walker might feel after tottering at the furthest edge of balance while crossing a deep canyon . . . and then recovering.

You had to find your way into the head of the person you were after like some kind of tiny burrowing animal, and you had to keep listening for something that wasn’t a beat but a brainwave: not a thought, precisely, but a way of thinking.

Milton Erickson was AWESOME at this!!!!

Pravda,

when people went through stressful life experiences, they often went back to their old habits.

You’ve forgotten how people are, and what they talk about . . . if you ever knew to begin with. If you try to be like these people, if you even dream you can be like these people, you are going to earn yourself a broken heart.

Like me

Of course he’ll want to come in, Norman told her, speaking in the heavily patient voice he employed when he was trying not to be angry with her but was getting angry anyway.

I have a voice in me as well. gets me sad and depressed and i often have a flashback

that the way he treated me was perfectly okay, perfectly normal. It’s not pain I’m afraid of; I know about pain. What I’m afraid of is the end of this small, sweet dream. I’ve had so few of them, you see.

I too have had very few dreams like that

she felt a totally inappropriate desire to hug herself.

it is as though a person is too bad of a person to be allowed happiness

For gals like these, paranoia was a lot more than a way of life; it was full state-of-the-art.

Odette

he would be like a blank sheet of photographic paper, ready to receive whatever images and ideas might come, without trying to change them so they would fit his own preconceptions.

Hard to do, but necessary

I’m not sure I trust my heart—it’s been scared

She found herself wishing he would put his arm around her again, and just as part of her mind was telling her not to be greedy and another part (Practical-Sensible) was telling her not to ask for trouble, he did just that.

wanting something that you deserve but thinking that your wanting it makes you "greedy"

He knew it, yes, but knowing and believing were sometimes worlds apart, and this was one of those times.

This is how i feel about how mom treated me

She’d start to feel she was getting a handle on it, and then it would whop her flat all over again, from some new direction.