The Stand

by Stephen King

“I am God’s Tom.”

“Some people through history have considered the insane and the retarded to be close to divine. I don’t think he told us anything that can be of practical use to us, but I know he scared the hell out of me. Magic, he said. How do you fight magic?”

“Come on, splendor in the grass,” she said. “See if you can’t fix the hinge on your mouth.”

This is a job for a weasel, not a lion.”

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

It was as if these people were wearing happy-folks faces, but their real faces, their underneath-faces, were monster faces. He had seen a scary movie about that once. That kind of monster was called a werewolf.

How does the rabbit feel when the shadow of the hawk falls on him like a dark crucifix … and then goes on without stopping or even slowing? How does the mouse feel when the cat who has been crouched patiently outside his hole for the entire day is picked up by its master and tossed unceremoniously out the front door?

“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.”

I once described him to a friend as the last magician of rational thought,

The choice, after all, had never been his to make, and he had come to believe that death was just a staging-area, a place to wait, the way you waited in a green-room before going on to play.

Stu Redman cursed her and blessed her at the same time.

“He’s in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”

Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problem. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names … the faces

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there … and still on your feet.

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.