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“That would be me, Roland-of-Steven.” “You know my name, do you?” “Aye! I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. T’is the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee until he spewed ’is—”
who would remain to stand against the Crimson King and his infernally clever chancellor? John Cullum, Aaron Deepneau, and Moses Carver. Three old men, one of them with blackmouth disease, which Eddie called can’t, sir.
Eddie said, “Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if the people who mean well would just creep away and die.” “That’d be the end of us, Big Ed,” Jake pointed out.
because the writer had only days left to live in his world, and the final Books of the Tower—three of them—remained unwritten. In the last one that was written in that key world, Roland’s ka-tet had banished sai Randy Flagg from a dream-palace on an interstate highway, a palace that had looked to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake like the Castle of Oz the Great and Terrible
But beyond page 676 of Wizard and Glass not a word about Roland and the Dark Tower had Stephen King written, and Walter considered this the real happy ending.
He had once probably known that any statement beginning with the words In truth is almost always a lie. No more. Too old to know. Too vain to know. Too stupid to remember.
What I want you to understand for now—or simply accept—is that reality is organic, reality is alive. It’s something like a muscle.
Because somewhere down deep they want to fight, and a guy like him would spoil everything.
He could no longer allow himself the luxury of anger even when anger was justified.
“I asked this magic man’s name and Trampas said, ‘I know it not, Ted, but I do know there’s no magic in him anymore, for he’s ceased whatever it was that ka meant him to do. If we leave him be, the Ka of Nineteen, which is that of his world, and the Ka of Ninety-nine, which is that of our world, will combine to—” But there is no more. That is where the tape runs out.
Roland smiled. “A man who can’t bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.”
Irene Tassenbaum looked at him for a moment longer, reminded herself that sometimes words were useless things, then started the engine and slammed the door.
He would have given anything to change what had happened, anything to close this hole with nothing in it, but this was the world where time ran just one way.
He opened it and slipped inside with no look back. That, he had found, was ever the easiest way.
Roland remembered one of Cort’s most serious maxims—Never speak the worst aloud!—but kept his own mouth shut, at least on that subject.
“Liars see their own kind everywhere,”
“Not the life I expected, not by any manner or means, but I got a theory—the folks who end up living the lives they expected are more often than not the ones who end up takin sleepin pills or stickin the barrel of a gun in their mouths and pullin the trigger.”
Laughter, Susannah would reflect later, is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny.
“There,” she said. “You have your own glammer, don’t you? Always did. You drew Eddie on to one death, and Jake to a pair of em. Now Patrick, and even the bumbler. Are you happy?” “No,” said he, and she saw he truly was not. She believed she had never seen such sadness and such loneliness on a human face.
“It could be a trick,” he said, most certainly reading her mind. “Life is a trick, love a glammer,” she replied. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, in the clearing at the end of the path.”
Will’ee help me see Oy into the ground, Patrick?” Patrick was willing, and the burial didn’t take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held. By mid-morning they had begun to cover the last few miles on the long road which led to the Dark Tower.
You are the grim, goal-oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are the unfortunate ones who still get the love-making all confused with the paltry squirt that comes to end the lovemaking
You’re the one who never changes, Cort had told him once, and in his voice Roland could have sworn he heard fear . . . although why Cort should have been afraid of him—a boy—Roland couldn’t tell. It’ll be your damnation, boy. You’ll wear out a hundred pairs of boots on your walk to hell. And Vannay: Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
