Doctor Sleep (The Shining, #2)

by Stephen King

We stood at the turning point. Half-measures availed us nothing. —The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

If we were to live, we had to be free of anger. [It is] the dubious luxury of normal men and women. —The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

FEAR stands for fuck everything and run. —Old AA saying

When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. I was your teacher.”

“I peeped over the edge of the grave—‘Let the boy see,’ my pa said when my ma tried to pull me back—and I scoped the coffin down in that wet hole and I thought, ‘Down there you’re six feet closer to hell, Black Grampa, and pretty soon you’ll be all the way, and I hope the devil gives you a thousand with a hand that’s on fire.’ ”

Learning itself is a present, you know. The best one anybody can give or get.

With the shining. She said that some spirits—angry spirits, mostly—won’t go on from this world, because they know what’s waiting for them is even worse. Most eventually starve away to nothing, but some of them find food. ‘That’s what the shining is to them, Dick,’ she told me. ‘Food. You’re feeding that preevert. You don’t mean to, but you are. He’s like a mosquito who’ll keep circling and then landing for more blood. Can’t do nothing about that. What you can do is turn what he came for against him.’ ”

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

He had come to believe that life was a series of ironic ambushes.

“We’re all dying. The world’s just a hospice with fresh air.”

Of course when you were running with the bottom dogs, what you mostly saw were paws, claws, and assholes.

I used to call his booze the Bad Stuff, Dan thought. Only sometimes it’s the Good Stuff. When you wake up from a nightmare that you know is at least fifty percent shining, it’s the Very Good Stuff.

‘All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.’ Have I answered your question?”

Sometimes she could make people do things. Not everyone, not even half of everyone, but a lot of people were very open to suggestions. (Probably they were the same ones who thought the stuff they sold on TV really would take away their wrinkles or make their hair grow back.) Abra knew this was a talent that could grow if she exercised it like a muscle, but she didn’t. It scared her.

Rose didn’t want the girl because she might—given the right drug cocktails and a lot of powerful psychic soothing—provide a nearly endless supply of steam. It was more personal than that. Turn her? Make her part of the True Knot? Never. The kid had kicked Rose the Hat out of her head as if she were some annoying religious goofball going door-to-door and handing out end-of-the-world tracts. No one had ever given her that kind of bum’s rush before. No matter how powerful she was, she had to be taught a lesson.

“They are the empty devils. They are sick and don’t know it.”

If you had ever met them—if they had ever gotten so much as a sniff of you—you’d be long dead, used and thrown away like an empty carton. That’s what happened to the one Abra calls the baseball boy. And many others. Children who shine are prey to them, but you already guessed that, didn’t you? The empty devils are on the land like a cancer on the skin. Once they rode camels in the desert; once they drove caravans across eastern Europe. They eat screams and drink pain. You had your horrors at the Overlook, Danny, but at least you were spared these folks. Now that the strange woman has her mind fixed on the girl, they won’t stop until they have her. They might kill her. They might Turn her. Or they might keep her and use her until she’s all used up, and that would be worst of all.”

the good thing about being old is that you don’t have to worry about dying young.”

You don’t shit in your nest, you feather it. Then, if bad times come, you have lots of friends.”

“What’s reasonable about killing kids so you can steal the stuff in their minds? What’s reasonable about that, you cowardly old whore? You sent your friends to do your work, you hid behind them, and I guess that was smart, because now they’re all dead.” “You stupid little bitch, you don’t know anything!” Rose leaped to her feet. Her thighs bumped the table and her coffee spilled, running beneath the bingo drum. Long Paul peeked through the kitchen doorway, took one look at her face, and pulled back. “Who’s the coward? Who’s the real coward? You can say such things over the phone, but you could never say them looking into my face!”

FEAR stands for face everything and recover. —Old AA saying

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it had started.

Yes. He could help. It was his sacrament, what he was made for. It was quiet now in Rivington House, very quiet indeed. Somewhere close, a door was swinging open. They had come to the border. Fred Carling looked up him, asking what. Asking how. But it was so simple. “You only need to sleep.” (don’t leave me) “No,” Dan said. “I’m here. I’ll stay here until you sleep.” Now he clasped Carling’s hand in both of his. And smiled. “Until you sleep,” he said.

“When a codependent is drowning, somebody else’s life flashes before his eyes.”

Let me close with a word of caution: when you’re on the turnpikes and freeways of America, watch out for those Winnebagos and Bounders. You never know who might be inside. Or what.