Firestarter

by Stephen King

“Well,” Quincey said, “he’s a rat man and a Skinner man both. A behaviorist. The behaviorists are not exactly being overwhelmed with love these days.”

If he had been alone, he would have killed himself long ago. A man wasn’t meant to bear pain like this.

“Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other.

“It’s active in biofeedback, it’s active in REM sleep, and people with damaged pituitaries rarely dream normally. People with damaged pituitaries have a tremendously high incidence of brain tumors and leukemia. The pituitary gland, Captain Hollister. It is, speaking in terms of evolution, the oldest endocrine gland in the human body. During early adolescence it dumps many times its own weight in glandular secretions into the bloodstream. It’s a terribly important gland, a terribly mysterious gland. If I believed in the human soul, Captain Hollister, I would say it resides within the pituitary gland.”

Next thing you’ll be thinking they’re everywhere—one behind every tree and a bunch of them right over the next hill. Hadn’t somebody said that perfect paranoia and perfect awareness were the same thing?

“Apple pie without a piece of cheese is like a smooch without a squeeze.”

“They don’t have anything at all to do with the CIA,” Andy said. “The Shop is really the DSI—Department of Scientific Intelligence. I read in an article about three years ago that some wiseacre nicknamed it the Shop in the early sixties, after a science-fiction story called ‘The Weapon Shops of Ishtar.’

“There’s no human being should be able to do what she can,” Irv said. “That may well be,” Andy said, and then he looked from Irv and directly into Norma Manders’s stony, unforgiving face. “But then, no human being should have to have cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy or leukemia. But it happens. And it happens to children.”

Andy went to her and gathered her up. “Everything is all right,” he said, and wondered why you had to say that to children even when they knew perfectly well, as you did, that it wasn’t true. “Everything’s fine. How do you feel, hon?”

“Nothing has happened that can’t be fixed,”

“It’s gonna be all right,” he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.

It was all in the past; none of it could be changed; it was time to stop thinking about it. A neat trick if you could do it.

God loves to make a man break a vow. It keeps him properly humble about his place in the world and his sense of self-control.

Ideals were cheap things to hold as long as there were no solid arguments for their overthrow.

May you live in interesting times.

For the last year and a half he had lived in extremely interesting times. He felt that just one more interesting thing would drive him totally insane.

It was amazing how time got by, how quickly a child could change, change in front of your eyes with an unobtrusiveness that was nearly terrible.

How long is a second or two, or a minute or two, in total darkness? How do you measure time in total darkness?

“The brain is a muscle that can move the world.”

Either way, the hurt, the cost, was enormous. Was this what being grownup was about? Dealing with that hurt? That cost? If it was, she hoped she would die young.