The Stand

by Stephen King

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

Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind.

“When things look serious, I do jokes. Some people smoke or chew gum. It’s the way I keep my shit together, that’s all. I don’t doubt there are lots of people who have better ways.

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

“In hard times the milk of human kindness don’t flow so free,

He was quite fond of science fiction, picking up falling-apart paperbacks from time to time on the dusty back shelves of antique barns for a nickel or a dime, and he found himself thinking, not for the first time, that it was going to be a great day for the deaf-mutes of the world when the telephone viewscreens the science fiction novels were always predicting finally came into general use.

People like Jess—and herself, too—had been taught all their lives that the good thing to do was commit and be active. Sometimes you had to hurt yourself—and badly—to find out it could be better to lie back in the tall weeds and procrastinate.

and the thought of a mosquito with the flu is just too ridiculous to consider.

No soul, but a sense of humor.

There’s precious little reform in the human race.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become.

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

Just the act of cooking made her feel better, because cooking was life.

“He says that he don’t believe in God.” The message relayed, he looked unhappily down at his shoes and waited for the explosion. But she only chuckled, got up, and walked across to Nick. She took one of his hands and patted it. “Bless you, Nick, but that don’t matter. He believes in you.”

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.”

it’s better that he be killed while somebody is trying to make him well than it would be for him to die while we just stand around watching

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

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.

Those were terrible things, but I think the cure was a lot worse than the disease.

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

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

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