The Stand

by Stephen King

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.

“Nobody,” Deitz said, and smiled. “On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it’s invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways.”

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.

Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.

But there was a more subtle, deeper part of him that whispered of the people who had filled these places and this road during other summers. Ladies in sunhats and shorts too tight for their large behinds. College boys in red-and-black-striped rugby shirts. Girls in beach shifts and thong sandals. Small screaming children with ice cream spread over their faces. They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups—never mind if the group was in an Aspen ski lodge or performing their prosaic-arcane rites of summer along US 1 in Maine. And now all those Americans were gone.

Inspector, I stand amazed—your deductive acumen is exceeded only by your good looks and the extraordinary length of your reproductive organ.

Abby, you are going to need your hand-pump. You enjoy your lectricity all you want, Abby, but you keep those oil-lamps of yours full and keep the wicks trimmed. You keep the cold-pantry just the way your mother kept it before you. And mind you don’t let any of the young folks talk you into anything you know to be against My will, Abby. They are your kin, but I am your Father.

“Blasphemy,” she told herself complacently. “The Lord provides strength, not taxicabs.”

“I know what he’s about but not who he is. He’s the purest evil left in the world. The rest of the bad is little evil. Shoplifters and sexfiends and people who like to use their fists. But he’ll call them. He’s started already. He’s getting them together a lot faster than we are. Before he’s ready to make his move, I guess he’ll have a lot more. Not just the evil ones that are like him, but the weak ones … the lonely ones … and the ones that have left God out of their hearts.”

“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 person don’t hardly feel right unless he’s lookin forward, you ever notice that?”

all looked at him. “Well,” he went on, a little on the defensive, I think, “if you look at it from a theological point of view, it does rather seem as if we’re the knot in a tug-o-war rope between heaven

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

But of course, he thought, there were still plenty of houses in Boulder where the shades were drawn. They were the houses of the dead. When they got sick, they had drawn their curtains against the world. They had drawn them and died in privacy, like any animal in its last extremity prefers to do. The living—maybe in subconscious acknowledgment of that fact of death—threw their shutters and their curtains wide.

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