The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, #7)

by Stephen King

You needn’t die happy when your day comes, but you must die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end and ka is always served.

The sköldpadda tumbled to the red rug, bounced beneath one of the tables, and there (like a certain paper boat some of you may remember) passes out of this tale forever.

“We’ve got to get to Turtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can’t find our way through to where Susannah is.”

Doesn’t sound like Roland’s voice

pilot sharks.)

Pilot fish?

She could feel her thighs hardening, pushing, but that seemed far away. Not

Did King ask any women what it’s like to give birth? What’s the deal with the thighs, bro??

SAY, YOU COOL CATS AND BOPPIN’ KITTIES!

Tiger king

Sing in your chains like the sea.

Jake tried counting the stairs, made it as far as a hundred and twenty, then lost his grip on the numbers. He wondered if they were still in New York (or under it). Once he thought he heard a faint, familiar rumbling and decided that if that was a subway train, they were.

Fairytale

He looked down and saw more grass, a brilliant green that was almost purple beneath the fluorescent lights, growing up out of the floor.

Fun description, since purple “doesn’t exist” but is actually just “not green” in our minds

Anyone who doesn’t think the imagination can kill is a fool.”

Eddie kept expecting the wind to begin outside, but the world went on holding its breath.

Flaherty stepped forward with his bleeding right hand clasped loosely around the butt of the gun that hung below his left armpit in a docker’s clutch.

Redundant; already stated where the gun was

which Prentiss and the Tego

O’Tego

teeth in the Tego’s

O’Tego’s

The tired voice began again, speaking from the Gingerbread House Dinky Earnshaw had made for Sheemie, a real place created from nothing more than imagination.

Aren’t all things created by imagination? ☺️

“Because talent won’t be quiet, doesn’t know how to be quiet,” he said. “Whether it’s a talent for safe-cracking, thought-reading, or dividing ten-digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It’ll wake you in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, ‘Use me, use me, use me! I’m tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use me!’”

“A man who can’t bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.”

the distant rumble of thunder, that sound of rolling bones.

Nerves, he thought, were for people who still hadn’t entirely made up their minds.

The need to recreate the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

“You mustn’t use your good-mind to steal my grief,” Susannah told him, “for I’d open my mouth and drink it to the dregs. Every drop.”

excused him from the room where Eddie lingered, giving up his vitality an inch at a time, leaving the imprint of his remarkable will on every last inch of his life’s tapestry.

He used to tell me that never’s the word God listens for when he needs a laugh.”

He had already noticed that this world was full of clocks, as if the people who lived here thought that by having so many they could cage time.

was a standard shift, for one thing. Irene Tassenbaum of Manhattan hadn’t driven a standard since she had been Irene Cantora of Staten Island. It was also a stick shift, and she had never driven one of those.

Aren’t standard shift and stick shift the same?

Roland had taken him in his arms then, too. Only then he had felt the boy’s beating heart. He would give anything to feel it beat again.

The hazy green-gold summerglow that lives only in forests (and old forests, at that, like the one where the Bear Shardik had rampaged), deepened. It fell through the trees in dusky beams, and the place where Roland finally stopped felt more like a church than a clearing.

Then the bumbler extended his neck and caressed the boy’s cheek a last time with his tongue. “I, Ake,” he said: Bye, Jake or I ache, it came to the same.

“Yes,” she said. “I would. I’ll just sit on the bench in the sunshine and wait for you. It’s . . . refreshing. Does that sound crazy?”

Isn’t it crazy to feel refreshed while sitting on a bench next to a fountain in the sunshine? 🙄 Come on, King!!

The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it slipped away, as such things often did: memory could be bashful.

Mist’ Dean come n saved Tower from them two honky thugs.” “Dad,” Marian said warningly. “You quit with the nigger talk, now. You’re old but not stupid.”

Stop wait WHAT??? Did he just use the n-word as a synonym for profane??

“How does it happen that a writer who’s not even very good—and I can say that, I’ve read four or five of his books—gets to be in charge of the world’s destiny? Or of the entire universe’s?” “If he’s not very good, why didn’t you stop at one?”

before we go in, we’ll speak their names. All of the lost.” “Your list will be longer than mine,” she said, “but mine will be long enough.”

She opens her mouth to tell them “You boys can’t be here, you boys are dead,” and then she realizes, with a great and singing relief, that all that business was just a dream she had.

The worst kind of dream to wake from

(the burning bones gave off a nasty smell, and they were careful to sit downwind).

I think King meant upwind here…come on, editors

But my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there’s just one rule with no exceptions: before victory comes temptation.

Susannah spread her arms, Roland’s pistol clenched in her right hand, and made a Y against the sky. Then she screamed. There were no words in it, nor could there have been. Our greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate.

She tried to remember the depth of her despair, how the cold had crept into her bones, turning them to glass, and couldn’t do it. Because the body had a way of forgetting the worst things, she supposed, and without the body’s cooperation, all the brain had were memories like faded snapshots.

It felt strange to laugh, but it was a good feeling, like finding something of value long after you were sure it was lost forever.

Joe smiled, showing a lot of white teeth. Susannah frowned. Had she seen his teeth before?

He’s not red riding hood, he’s the wolf wearing grandma as a disguise

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. Joe

she had already marked the antenna rising from the center of his head—twirling and twirling in the bright morning light—and she felt confident she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to. Easy-peasy-Japaneezy, Eddie would have said.

Yikessss a little too close to a z***erhead slur reference for my taste

And mayhap I’ll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it’s so, for there’s many I’ve known that I’d see again.”

“Will you draw something else for me?”

She should have asked him to draw his tongue back

“Hey, if we’re gonna be friends, you gotta be friends with my kid brother. We’re tight. Jake! Hey, Jake!”

Got me sobbing, King

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal “Once upon a time.” Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye.