The Stand

by Stephen King

Baby, the world is a daytime drama. We love our lives, and so we look for the guiding light as we search for tomorrow.

love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought … it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down

All you can do is have sort of a slow leak, Rudy had told him once, but in a soap opera world, that can come in handy.

That was one monkey who was hurtin for certain. It was a hard old world.

End of the World Suite Arranged for Clockwork Figures.

“Yeah, just lookin for an honest monster,”

They’ve solved the depressed economy, pollution, the oil shortage, and the cold war, all at a stroke. Yeah, they put things in order, all right. They solved everything the same way Alexander solved the Gordian knot—by cutting it in two with his sword.”

He thought best in scenes like these. In scenes like these, any man could be Iago.

Structure was a necessary thing.

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.”

“I like to listen,” Stu said. “Then you are one of God’s chosen. Let’s go.”

This man had expressed all the complex things he had felt in just a handful of sentences. It wasn’t just the gate-guard he wanted to get even with—why, here’s the wise-ass pusbag, what’s the story, pusbag, got anything smart to say?—because

“You know what the Bible says about people like that?” Flagg asked quietly. “It says the exalted shall be abased and the mighty shall be brought low and the stiffnecked shall be broken. And you know what it says about people like you, Lloyd? It says blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. And it says blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”

“That’s illegal! M-O-O-N and that spells il-legal. Don’t you know—”

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.

A person don’t hardly feel right unless he’s lookin forward,

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

Everyone wanted to be a foreman and nobody wanted to be a fielhand!

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.

In cases where planes or trains crash, the vehicles are running at 61% capacity, as regards passenger loads. In cases where they don’t, the vehicles are running at 76% capacity. That’s a difference of 15% over a large computer run, and that sort of across-the-board deviation is significant. Staunton points out that, statistically speaking, a 3% deviation would be food for thought, and he’s right. It’s an anomaly the size of Texas.

He stores up rebuffs the way pirates were supposed to store up treasure …

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.”

They

Government is an idea, Stu. That’s really all it is, once you strip away the bureaucracy and the bullshit. I’ll go further. It’s an inculcation, nothing but a memory path worn through the brain. What we’ve got going for us now is culture lag. Most of these people still believe in government by representation—the Republic—what they think of as ‘democracy.’

But culture lag never lasts long. After a while they’ll start having the gut reactions: the President is dead, the Pentagon is for rent, nobody is debating anything in the House and the Senate except maybe for the termites and the cockroaches. Our people here are very soon going to wake up to the fact that the old ways are gone, and that they can restructure society any old way they want. We want—we need—to catch them before they wake up and do something nutty.”

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

Because she’s what those of us who ride the sociology range call other-directed.”

“When you were a little boy, Stu, did you ever dream that you might grow up to be one of seven high priests and/or priestesses to a one-hundred-and-eight-year-old black woman from Nebraska?”

The curse and blessing of the human race was its chumminess. Why, if six people went floating down the Mississippi on a church roof in a flood, they’d start a bingo game as soon as the roof grounded on a sandbar.

Anti-Christ? You might as well say anti-creation.

Authority. Organization. He circled the words again and now they were like prisoners behind a triple stockade. How well they went together … and what a sorry sound they made.

I don’t want to have to share secrets with anyone who grins like that and looks as if he isn’t sleeping well at night.

weren’t all his nights symphonies of silence? Why had his body suddenly broke out in gooseflesh?

It’s a Zen question, not really a question at all but a way to clear your mind, like saying Om and looking at the tip of your nose.”

Hadn’t Einstein said there were only six people in the world who understood all the implications of E=mc2? What about the equation inside his own skull? The relativity of Harold. The speed of blight. Oh, he could fill twice as many pages as he had already written about that, becoming more obscure, more arcane, until he finally became lost in the clockwork of himself and still nowhere near the mainspring at all. He was perhaps … raping himself.

If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.

ersatz as powdered eggs.

Thank God for tunnel vision. Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.

Things had changed. The whole range of human perception seemed to have stepped up a notch. It was scary as hell.

Who emptied the beaker loses importance beside the general truth: At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave. The laws of physics, the laws of biology, the axioms of mathematics, they’re all part of the deathtrip, because we are what we are.

The fashion was to blame it on ‘technology,’ but ‘technology’ is the trunk of the tree, not the roots. The roots are rationalism, and I would define that word so: ‘Rationalism is the idea we can ever understand anything about the state of being.’

And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip … at least unless it proves otherwise.”

Because he had the eyes of a man who has been trying to look into the dark for a long time and has maybe begun to see what is there.

But people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. I’ll go.

“For God’s sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity!

“He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He’s always outside. 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. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He’s the king of nowhere. But he’s afraid of us. He’s afraid of … inside.”

“She’s in the wilderness, God has lifted her up in the wilderness, she does not fear the terror that flies at noon or the terror that creeps at midnight … neither will the snake bite her nor the bee sting her … but she’s not right with God yet. It was not the hand of Moses that brought water from the rock. It was not the hand of Abagail that turned the weasels back with their bellies empty. She’s to be pitied. She will see, but she will see too late. There will be death. His death. She will die on the wrong side of the river. She—”