The Stand

by Stephen King

In this light, in this drizzle, with his legs and head still throbbing from the bringdown, New York had all the charm of a dead whore.

“You’re free, white, and twenty-one. If he helps you, fine.”

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.

A man who loves money is a bastard, someone to be hated. A man who can’t take care of it is a fool. You don’t hate him, but you got to pity him.”

“I’m an old man trying to give a young daughter advice, and it’s like a monkey trying to teach table manners to a bear.

What we do and what we think … those things are so often based on arbitrary judgments when they are right.

Joe Bob felt fine; dying was the last thing on his mind. Nevertheless, he was already a sick man. He had gotten more than gas at Bill Hapscomb’s Texaco. And he gave Harry Trent more than a speeding summons.

Under the California desert and subsidized by the taxpayers’ money, someone had finally invented a chain letter that really worked. A very lethal chain letter.

During their wait in Sweeney’s office they communicated the sickness which would soon be known across the disintegrating country as Captain Trips to more than twenty-five people, including a matronly woman who just came in to pay her bill before going on to pass the disease to her entire bridge club.

Consciousness was down to a narrow pencil beam.

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

A young man munching Fritos from a gigantic bag told Larry conversationally that he was going to fulfill a lifetime ambition. He was going to Yankee Stadium, run around the outfield naked, and then masturbate on home plate. “Chance of a lifetime, man,” he told Larry, winked with both eyes, and then wandered off, eating Fritos.

The proper breeding ground for dictatorship, conditions of want, need, uncertainty, privation … they simply wouldn’t exist.

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.”

When Lloyd stumbled in weakness, Flagg seized his arm above the elbow and bore him up. Lloyd turned and looked into that grinning face with something more than gratitude. He looked at Flagg with something like love.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just … come out the other side. Or you don’t.

Prophecy is the gift of God and everyone has a smidge of it. My own grandmother used to call it the shining lamp of God, sometimes just the shine.

“You’ll see. There’s bitter days ahead. Death and terror, betrayal and tears. And not all of us will be alive to see how it ends.”

“A liberal arts education teaches you how to think—I read that somewhere. The hard facts you learn are secondary to that. The big thing you take away from school with you is how to induct and deduct in a constructive way.”

I have a theory—” (Doesn’t he always, diary?) “—that has to do with evolution. You know, once men—or their progenitors:—had tails and hair all over their bodies, and much sharper senses than they do now. Why don’t we have them anymore?

Dayna and her friends asked the trio to join them, but the old man waved them off, saying something about “having business in the desert.”

Once such incantatory phrases as “we see now through a glass darkly” and “mysterious are the ways He chooses His wonders to perform” are mastered, logic can be happily tossed out the window. 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.”

“Say, what are you wearing under that shirt?” “A big strong man like yourself should be able to find that out without my help,” Fran said primly. It turned out to be nothing.

You just couldn’t get hold of the things you had done and turn them right again. Such power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to men and women, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens. If you knew that past was out of reach, maybe you could forgive.

He came out of time. He doesn’t know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us. We’re inside. He knows magic.

“This man’s name seems to be Randall Flagg, although some people have associated the names Richard Frye, Robert Freemont, and Richard Freemantle with him. The initials R.F. may have some significance, but if so, none of us on the Free Zone Committee know what it is.

And it came to him with a dreamy, testicle-shriveling certainty that this was the dark man, his soul, his ka somehow projected into this rain-drenched, grinning crow that was looking in at him, checking up on him.

If it was him, could I kill him? Trap his ka—if there is such a thing—inside that dying crow body?

She had a sudden horrible feeling that it was staring at her, that it was his eye with its contact lens of humanity removed, staring at her as the Eye of Sauron had stared at Frodo from the dark fastness of Barad-Dur, in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

Liars sit in chairs, so we’ll eschew them. We’ll sit as though we were friends on opposite sides of a campfire.

This place had been only a way station, and now it was time to go on.

The Walkin Dude was back in Vegas.

Once he wouldn’t have minded, but things had changed. And when your head changed, he was finding out, it most always changed forever.

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.’

They stood and waved down. Stu raised his hand in return. They left. And they never saw Stu Redman again.

“Call him Beelzebub, because that’s his name, too. Call him Nyarlahotep and Ahaz and Astaroth. Call him R’yelah and Seti and Anubis. His name is legion and he’s an apostate of hell and you men kiss his ass.”

In the sudden hush the sound of those bootheels clocking their way down the cement path was the only sound … a sound out of time. The dark man was grinning.

“You ain’t a man at all! You’re some kind of a … a devil!” Flagg stretched out the index finger of his left hand so that it almost touched Whitney Horgan’s chin. “Yes, that’s right,” he said so softly that no one but Lloyd and Larry Underwood heard. “I am.”

Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.