The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, #7)

by Stephen King

As a writer of stories, was King not a creator? And at bottom, wasn’t creation about making something from nothing—seeing the world in a grain of sand or pulling one’s self up by one’s own bootstraps?

Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts’ deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead.

There’s a phrase, the elephant in the living room, which purports to describe what it’s like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, “How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn’t you see the elephant in the living room?” And it’s so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth: “I’m sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn’t know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture.” There comes an aha-moment for some folks—the lucky ones—when they suddenly recognize the difference.

“My grandfather had a proverb,” Pimli said. “‘You don’t worry about dropping the eggs until you’re almost home.’ We’re almost home now.”

“We are ka-tet,” Roland said. “We are one from many. We have shared our water as we have shared our lives and our quest. If one should fall, that one will not be lost, for we are one and will not forget, even in death.”

Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a small-scale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to recreate the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.

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

Time was a thief, and one of the first things it took was your sense of humor.

“Feels pretty goddamned thick to me. A Stephen King book for sure. He sells by the inch, America buys by the pound.”

my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there’s just one rule with no exceptions: before victory comes temptation. And the greater the victory to win, the greater the temptation to withstand.”

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.

You know how Cleveland got started? A bunch of people in New York said, ‘Gee I’m starting to enjoy the crime and the poverty, but it’s not quite cold enough. Let’s go west.’”