Duma Key

by Stephen King

And besides, she had a little of what Wireman had. It went unacknowledged between us, but it was there.

but kids from nice homes had also been raised to believe safety was their birthright.

Shall I tell you we were very much in love?” “No,” I said. “I hear it every time you say her name.”

I thought the eyes looking out of this photograph and the eyes looking up at Candy Brown in The Picture were almost the same. But maybe all children’s eyes are the same.

God punishes us for what we can’t imagine.

the three of us were here because something wanted us here.

Ka-Tet

There were undoubtedly strange forces at work here, but not every shadow was a ghost.

“Why does she mess them up when she’s like this?” “I think . . . because she can’t stand looking at what she’s not.”

if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you. Sometimes without parole.

“Yes,” I said. I was clear on something else, as well: when someone offers you a blank check, you must never, ever cash it. That wasn’t a thing I thought out. Sometimes understanding bypasses the brain and proceeds directly from the heart.

I found a great many beer and soda cans (most worn as smooth and white as amnesia),

when memory takes its strongest hold, our own bodies become ghosts, haunting us with the gestures of our younger selves.

That was a hunch I never verified, but then, I never had to. Some things you simply know are true.

But that’s not a very original idea, is it? It’s really just a platitude . . . sort of like a Florida sunset. Nevertheless, it happens to be the truth, and the truth deserves to be spoken . . . if you can say it in a new way.

There’s spring on the west coast of Florida, but it only stops for a cup of coffee before heading north to do the heavy work.

but there were also shots of him shaking hands with George Bush the First and Maury Povich (intellectual equals, in my book),

Do you know what’s queer? Remembering forgetting. It’s like looking into a hall of mirrors.

I thought—not for the first time—that Perse was a funny word. You couldn’t trust it. It kept changing.

Because an honest woman may occasionally goof the truth, but a good liar never varies her story.

tragedy is a tragedy, and at the bottom, all tragedies are stupid.

Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh.”

“My mind is like a tablecloth with a great big hole burned into it.”

Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.

Their reason still sleeps, and the sleep of reason breeds monsters.

Sleep of the just

Someday, if your life is long and your thinking machinery stays in gear, you’ll live to remember the last good thing that ever happened to you.

I could feel myself starting to dissolve like a tissue in a cloudburst.

“You just want to be careful they don’t grow teeth. Because they can. Then, sometimes when you reach for the light-switch to make them go away, you discover the power’s out.”

It seemed that in the end, only time could issue a divorce decree. And that the decree would be partial at best.

Tim

Misprint!

I have wondered since then—I know it’s morbid, but yes, I’ve wondered—if she would have smoked more of it if she had known it was to be her last.

I was having that I’m-in-a-dream feeling again. The kind that may tilt you into a nightmare at any moment.

The truth can be hidden away again, if it’s too terrible for the world to look at. And it happens. I’m sure it happens all the time.

Roger Williams Park

“Think of me as a gunslinger of the art world.

forgetting isn’t always involuntary. Sometimes it’s willed.

and the regular exercise of the imagination—its visual aspect in particular—is enough to make it stop.

Its polished surface struck me as a pitch-perfect mockery of life.

“Being dead is better,”

Callback!

“How many of Edgar’s family and friends bought pictures?”

ILSE HAS ONE!!!!!!!!!

There were elder gods in those days; kings and queens they were.

When someone says something like that, you always try to fasten some kind of mental safety belt. But it rarely works. Most people don’t have one.

My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say I can do this even when you know you can’t.

The barrel of the gun rose with the recoil. Wireman let it. I’ve never seen calm like that, and it still amazes me.

A Gunslinger

life is a wheel,

Ka

“There’s nothing like an atta-boy from a doubtful dad.”

Don’t quit until the picture’s complete. I can’t tell you if that’s the cardinal rule of art or not, I’m no teacher, but I believe those six words sum up all I’ve been trying to tell you.

Out there in the Gulf, waiting, ticking back and forth on the mild swell like a clock that tells time in years and centuries rather than minutes and hours, is the black hulk of Perse’s ship.

she is something other, something beyond human understanding. In the moonlight her face is ghastly and full of knowing.

Lovecraft

Then the Desert Eagle roared, and the bird’s mad blue glare disappeared along with the rest of its head, in a fine spray of blood.

Definitely a gunslinger

And what do you do when you can’t use anger to fall back on? You admit the truth.