Firestarter

by Stephen King

“Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other. The comic-book philosophy of Jim Paulson in a nutshell. Take good care of the little stranger.”

“No, I know where everything goes,” Irv said. “Most everything, anyhow. She changes things from week to week. No woman wants a man to feel right at home in her kitchen. They like help, sure, but they feel better if you have to ask them where to put the casserole dish or where they put the Brillo.”

“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.”

“Those men came with no warrants nor blueback paper of any kind and tried to take them off our land,” he said. “People I’d invited in like it’s done in a civilized country with decent laws. One of them shot me, and one of them tried to shoot Andy here. Missed his head by no more than a quarter of an inch.” Andy remembered the first deafening report and the splinter of wood that had jumped from the porch support post. He shivered. “They came and did those things. What do you want me to do, Norma? Sit here and turn them over to the secret police if they get their peckers up enough to come back? Be a good German?”

that silent and somehow baleful woman who was a member of the American Society of Atheists and would explain to you, should you ask, the Thirty Greatest Inconsistencies in the King James Bible, or, should you prefer, the Laughable Fallacy of the Clockspring Theory of the Universe, all with the thudding, irrevocable logic of a dedicated preacher.