Lisey's Story

by Stephen King

time apparently did nothing but blunt grief’s sharpest edge so that it hacked rather than sliced.

(How many years does it take, she’ll wonder two nights later, lying in bed alone in her substandard motel room and listening to dogs bark beneath a hot orange moon, before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?)

Each marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. This is the dark heart of theirs, the one mad true secret.

She awoke in the deepest ditch of the night, when the moon is down and the hour is none.

But what good is talk, and a special language, if there’s no one to talk to?

sometimes it was best to be quiet; sometimes it was best to just shut your everlasting mouth and hang on, hang on, hang on.

The exhausted mind is obsession’s easiest prey, and after half an hour of fruitless searching in the attic, where the air was hot and still, the light was poor, and the shadows seemed slyly determined to hide every nook she wanted to investigate, Lisey gave way to obsession without even realizing it.

He only told her once, but that one time he was perfectly straight about it: there could be no kids.

“Lunacy and the Landons go together like peaches and cream,

You’re good for the ones you love. You want to be good for the ones you love, because you know that your time with them will end up being too short, no matter how long it

“There’s a place. We called it Boo’ya Moon, I forget why. It’s mostly pretty.”

There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart.

“I love you, honey. Everything the same.”