Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

At night your thoughts have an unpleasant way of slipping their collars and running free.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.

Bookreaders are just as willing as anyone else to start out with the weather, but as a general rule they can actually go on from there.

It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never be quite the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.

you have to be ready for rain when you’re at camp. Without a good book, even two days of rain in the woods can be enough to drive you bonkers.

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.

any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on, I think, but in little towns the makeup tends to be thin.

Wealth is like the Richter scale—once you pass a certain point, the jumps from one level to the next aren’t double or triple but some amazing and ruinous multiple you don’t even want to think about.

when you’re on your own, strange behavior really doesn’t seem strange at all.

I’m always curious about what people are reading; the only better insight into them is the contents of their medicine cabinets,

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time.

sometimes things work just because you think they work. It’s as good a definition of faith as any.

America has turned the people who entertain it into weird high-class whores, and the media jeers at any “celeb” who dares complain about his or her treatment.

her. It was as if the heart had been burned out of her and the sadness which remained was just another ghost, the memory of love haunting the bones of hate.

Once crazy goes past a certain point, you’re on a turnpike with no exit ramps.

Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme.