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all you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew.
“When the King comes and the Tower falls, sai, all such pretty things as yours will be broken.
A snatch of old Bob Dylan lyric occurred to him, something about the price you had to pay to keep from going through everything twice.
Roland, never a very humorous fellow even at the best of times, didn’t smile.
“Listen to me,” Eddie replied. “I’m playing a hunch here, but a hunch is not all this is. We’ve met one man, Ben Slightman, who wrote a book in another world. Tower’s world. This world. And we’ve met another one, Donald Callahan, who was a character in a book from another world. Again, this world.”
When you came right down to it, how did anyone know they weren’t a character in some writer’s story, or a transient thought in some bus-riding schmoe’s head, or a momentary mote in God’s eye?
some things people just won’t believe, not even when you can prove em.
He used to quote a line from some Greek poet. ‘The column of truth has a hole in it.’
Because in some vital way, they aren’t the real world. Or if they’re real, they’re not the key world.
“Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference.”
“This is where they brought them,” she said. “Where the Wolves brought the twins they stole from Calla Bryn Sturgis. Where they—what?—operated on them.”
“Yes. But then you changed. Right under my hand. It got so I couldn’t tell if you were the hero, the antihero, or no hero at all. When you let the kid drop, that was the capper.” “You said you made me do that.” Looking Roland straight in the eyes—blue meeting blue amid the endless choir of voices—King said: “I lied, brother.”
“Because what’s seen can’t be unseen. What’s known can’t be unknown.” He paused. “Save perhaps in death.”
“Folks don’t come to Jesus in the summertime, anyway,” he said matter-of-factly. “They do a little window-shopping and then go back to their sinning.
to beware of the strange woman, for her lips drip as does the honeycomb but her feet go down to death and her steps take hold on hell.
She understands how being afraid all the time makes one’s friends more precious; how it makes every bite of every meal sweet; how it stretches time until every day seems to last forever,
In the Land of Memory, the time is always Now.
Yes, Mia had lied and betrayed; yes, she had tried her best to get Eddie and Roland killed. But what choice had she ever had? Susannah realized, with dawning bitterness, that she could now give the perfect definition of a ka-mai: one who has been given hope but no choices.
She saw that same pain on Mia’s face and thought again how her entire existence seemed to have become a wilderness of mirrors.
but it’s strange how blurry it all seems. Oh well, who remembers all the nasty little nooks of their childhood? Who wants to?
