Needful Things

by Stephen King

It seemed that his tears had a lot in common with the possessions of his dead loved ones; you never got to the end of them.

Suddenly the old grief rose up and folded him in its gray embrace and he wanted his father. After all these years that old pain was gnawing his bones again, as fresh and as hungry as it had been on the day when his mother had come home from the hospital and taken his hands and said We have to be very brave now, Norris.

“Grief is brutal.”

This idea that I owe more grief is still there part of the time, I can’t deny that, but to my credit I know that it’s nuts . . . because part of me—a lot of me, in fact—is still grieving.” “You must be human,” she said softly. “How weirdly exotic and excitingly perverse.”

Not all the things which happen in small towns are known to the residents, no matter how sharp their ears are or how energetically their tongues wag. In Castle Rock they knew about Frank Dodd, the cop who went crazy and killed the women back in Sheriff Bannerman’s day, and they knew about Cujo, the Saint Bernard who had gone rabid out on Town Road #3, and they knew that the lakeside home of Thad Beaumont, novelist and local Famous Person, had burned to the ground during the summer of 1989, but they did not know the circumstances of that burning, or that Beaumont had been haunted by a man who was really not a man at all, but a creature for which there may be no name.

All references to other King books!

He could not moderate his grief, and at last found, with deep incoherent relief, that he had no urge to do so.

She knew as well as any woman ever has that abuse does not have to be administered with the fists to be effective. Men as well as women can wound with their tongues,

It was funny stuff, sanity. When it was taken away, you didn’t know it. You didn’t feel its departure. You only really knew it when it was restored, like some rare wild bird which lived and sang within you not by decree but by choice.