The Mist

by Stephen King

The horrors of the Inquisition are nothing compared to the fates your mind can imagine for your loved ones.

Five-year-olds have as many questions as Hallmark has cards.

Kids don’t fight shock the way adults do; they go with it, maybe because kids are in a semipermanent state of shock until they’re thirteen or so.

You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Of if you can paint, maybe you think—I did—that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

Children see everything their eyes happen upon, hear everything in their ears’ range. But if life is the rise of consciousness (as a crewel-work sampler my wife made in high school proclaims), then it is also the reduction of input.

“I would do anything—take any chances—just to see the sun again.”