Insomnia

by Stephen King

girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It’s like, ‘Here’s your Barbie, here’s your Ken, here’s your Hostess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it’ll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you’ll get the blame.’

Listen—I’m a Catholic, my lovin mother was a Catholic, my kids—if I ever have any—are all gonna be altarboys at Saint Joe’s. Great. Being a Catholic’s great. They even let you eat meat on Fridays now. But if you think being Catholic means I’m in favor of making abortions illegal again, you got the wrong puppy. See, I’m the Catholic who gets to question the guys who beat their kids with rubber hoses or push them downstairs after a night of drinking good Irish whiskey and getting all sentimental about their mothers.” Leydecker fished inside his shirt and brought out a small gold medallion. He placed it on his fingers and tilted it toward Ralph. “Mary, Mother of Jesus. I’ve worn this since I was thirteen. Five years ago I arrested a man wearing one just like it. He had just boiled his two-year-old stepson. This is a true thing I’m telling you. Guy put on a great big pot of water, and when it was boiling, he picked the kid up by the ankles and dropped him into the pot like he was a lobster. Why? Because the kid wouldn’t stop wetting the bed, he told us. I saw the body, and I’ll tell you what, after you’ve seen something like that, the photos the right-to-life assholes like to show of vacuum abortions don’t look so bad.” Leydecker’s voice had picked up a slight tremor. “What I remember most of all is how the guy was crying, and how he kept holding onto that Mary medallion around his neck and saying he wanted to go to confession. Made me proud to be a Catholic, Ralph, let me tel...

Everything lies in intent. There are few mistakes in this world… and once you get to know your way around, maybe there are no mistakes at all.

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked, was exceeding wroth—and a mixture of fright and shame filled him. Thoughts of vampirism recurred as well, and a snatch from a famous old Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy and he is us.

we are, in fact, the physicians of last resort?

“That there’s a lot of worry and determination in the air?” Dalton asked. To Ralph his smile looked both nervous and disdainful. “Yes, I suppose you could put it that way. We’re worried that Susan Day, one of this country’s greatest unindicted criminals, will succeed in her efforts to confuse the central issue here in Derry: the murder of twelve to fourteen helpless unborn children each and every day.” “But Mr. Dalton—” “And”—Dalton overrode him—“we are determined to show a watching nation that we are not willing to be good Nazis, that we are not all cowed by the religion of political correctness—the dreaded pee-cee.”

“They’re the same people who want to see guns oulawed so people won’t shoot each other with them, the same ones who say the electric chair and the gas chamber are unconstitutional because they’re cruel and unusual punishment. They say those things, then go out and support laws that allow doctors—doctors!—to stick vacuum tubes into women’s wombs and pull their unborn sons and daughters to pieces. That’s what gets me the most.”

She’s running with the wolves… and women who run with wolves shouldn’t be acting too surprised if they get bitten.”

“Goddam right-to-lifers!” the running man cried. “Fucking self-righteous turds! I’d like to kill them all!”

Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best,

the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in mid-December and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door.