It

by Stephen King

Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists.

Ben loved the library. He loved the way it was always cool, even on the hottest day of a long hot summer; he loved its murmuring quiet, broken only by occasional whispers, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books and cards, or the riffle of pages being turned in the Periodicals Room, where the old men hung out, reading newspapers which had been threaded into long sticks. He loved the quality of the light, which slanted through the high narrow windows in the afternoons or glowed in lazy pools thrown by the chain-hung globes on winter evenings while the wind whined outside. He liked the smell of the books—a spicy smell, faintly fabulous. He would sometimes walk through the adult stacks, looking at the thousands of volumes and imagining a world of lives inside each one, the way he sometimes walked along his street in the burning smoke-hazed twilight of a late-October afternoon, the sun only a bitter orange line on the horizon, imagining the lives going on behind all the windows—people laughing or arguing or arranging flowers or feeding kids or pets or their own faces while they watched the boobtube.

A true love letter <3

He was suddenly uneasy—almost terrified—at the thought of seeing them all again, their children’s faces almost worn away, almost buried under change as the old hospital had been buried. Banks erected inside their heads where once magic picture-palaces had stood.

his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity’s engine.

And he felt suddenly that It was the seventh; that It and time were somehow interchangeable, that It wore all their faces as well as the thousand others with which It had terrified and killed… and the idea that It might be them was somehow the most frightening idea of all. How much of us was left behind here? he thought with sudden rising terror. How much of us never left the drains and the sewers where It lived… and where It fed? Is that why we forgot? Because part of each of us never had any future, never grew, never left Derry? Is that why?

Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends—maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

He could live with what had happened in the house on Neibolt Street. The world was, after all, full of wonders.

The years moved fast. The years ran. If you turned around and ran after your own childhood, you had to really let out your stride and bust your buns.

even at eleven he had observed that things turned out right a ridiculous amount of the time.

Perhaps at the end, when the masks of horror were laid aside, there was nothing with which the human mind could not cope.

They struck together with their right fists, but Bill understood it was not really their fists they were striking with at all; it was their combined force, augmented by the force of that Other; it was the force of memory and desire; above all else, it was the force of love and unforgotten childhood like one big wheel.

maybe it wasn’t the sort of thing you could have gotten up and testified about at a City Council meeting—how you stood out in the cold dark and learned to love the light.

My heart is with all of them, and I think that, even if we forget each other, we’ll remember in our dreams.

He sees them as they were, as they always will be in some part of his mind… and his heart breaks with love and horror.

Disquiet and desire. All the difference between world and want—the difference between being an adult who counted the cost and a child who just got on it and went, for instance. All the world between. Yet not that much difference at all.

“Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYYYYYY!” Bill Denbrough cried deliriously, and rushed down the hill toward whatever there would be, aware for one last time of Derry as his place, aware most of all that he was alive under a real sky, and that all was desire, desire, desire. He raced down the hill on Silver: he raced to beat the devil.

Best not to look back. Best to believe there will be happily ever afters all the way around—and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

the ghosts of children standing in the water at sunset, standing in a circle, standing with their hands joined together, their faces young, sure, but tough… tough enough, anyway, to give birth to the people they will become, tough enough to understand, maybe, that the people they will become must necessarily birth the people they were before they can get on with trying to understand simple mortality. The circle closes, the wheel rolls, and that’s all there is. You don’t have to look back to see those children; part of your mind will see them forever, live with them forever, love with them forever. They are not necessarily the best part of you, but they were once the repository of all you could become. Children I love you. I love you so much.

drive away from Derry, from memory… but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.

he thinks that it is good to be a child, but it is also good to be grownup and able to consider the mystery of childhood… its beliefs and desires.

it’s nice to think so for awhile in the morning’s clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love. To think that what has looked forward must also look back, and that each life makes its own imitation of immortality: a wheel.