The Stand

by Stephen King

When asked, “How do you write?” I invariably answer, “One word at a time,” and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time. But I’ve read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

New York had all the charm of a dead whore.

The ashtray was clean, reproachfully spotless, and he tapped into it with a slight pang.

Put not your trust in the princes of this world, for they will frig thee up and so shalt their governments, even unto the end of the earth.

He didn’t bore her. So far as she knew, he didn’t bore anyone, except possibly her mother.

they would punch him out. Why? No reason. Except that maybe in the vast white class of victims there is a subclass: the victims of victims.

Life is a fine thing, Nick, but old age takes an unpleasantly high toll on one’s dearly held prejudices, I find.”

New York, thy name is paranoia.

Your first impulse is to share good news, your second is to club someone with it.

Jess was just being Jess, trying to protect his image of himself to himself, the way all thinking people do so they can get to sleep at night.

It’s a mistake to become too predictable.

No answer. Not even a cry of “Mother!” At this point, he might have welcomed it. Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

His eyes were soft and joyful and utterly crazy. They were the eyes of a man who has discovered the great axle of his destiny and has laid his hands upon it.

He didn’t care for light classical music. If you were going to have classical shit, you ought to go whole hog and have your Beethoven or your Wagner or someone like that. Why fuck around?

It had been Stu’s experience that a grinning dog is either a biting dog or a damned good dog.

“To us, Stu. May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain.”

dreams are the psyche’s way of taking a good dump every now and then. And that people who don’t dream—or don’t dream in a way they can often remember when they wake up—are mentally constipated in some way. After all, the only practical compensation for having a nightmare is waking up and realizing it was all just a dream.”

It was only when he was jogging, concentrating on nothing more than the thud of his tennis shoes on the sidewalk and the swing of his arms and his steady harsh respiration, that he lost that feeling of impending madness.

She couldn’t be on his wavelength all the time. That’s all. When you could recognize that and deal with it, you were on your way to an adult relationship.

Show me a man or woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call “society.” Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.

began the slow, cautious business of getting to know each other.

The car ate road and blew miles out its tailpipe. The car was a form of teleportation. The car defeated the map.

Larry found himself smiling at the boy and thinking you couldn’t not like someone who liked the guitar.

The only thing dumber than a broody hen was a New York Democrat.

God was as necessary for old women as enemas and Lipton tea bags.

one of the things that makes Harold hard to like is how eager he is to show off how much he knows

The Who that sometimes used to finish their live performances by smashing their guitars and amplifiers. This was known as “conspicuous consumption.”

There is a certain mentality that believes in covering up. They believe in it with the sincerity and fanaticism that members of some religious groups believe in the divinity of Jesus. Because, for some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important.

could never believe that anyone could think he was cool. Part of him has such a huge investment in being square. He is determined to carry all of his problems right along with him

The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance … or change.

Religious mania is one of the few infallible ways of responding to the world’s vagaries, because it totally eliminates pure accident. To the true religious maniac, it’s all on purpose.

There is really nothing so comforting to the beaten of spirit or the broken of skull than a good strong dose of “Thy will be done.”

Government is an idea, Stu. That’s really all it is, once you strip away the bureaucracy and the bullshit.

“If you want to short-circuit the democratic process, ask a sociologist.”

You can measure the strength of any society’s faith by seeing how much that faith weakens when its empiric object is removed.”

“Games have a way of turning serious sometimes.”

people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

asking for too much is one of humanity’s more popular ways of courting disaster.”

It’s hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else’s.”

All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow—my life.

It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces.

“Very important. You do this right, and someone bigger than me is going to be very happy with you.” “Okay.” Barry hung up and Lloyd did too, confident that Barry understood the converse: Fuck it up and somebody is going to be very angry with you.

Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.

“The Lord is my shepherd,” he recited softly. “I shall not want for nothing. He makes me lie down in the green pastures. He greases up my head with oil. He gives me kung-fu in the face of my enemies. Amen.”

Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means ‘no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.’

Kojak didn’t appear to know or care, but he wagged his tail to show he was on Larry’s side.