The Mist

by Stephen King

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

Nothing in nature is that even; man is the inventor of straight edges.

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.

Maybe you can tell me—why should the silencing of that childish, demanding voice seem so much like dying?

The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.

Terror is the widening of perspective and perception. The horror was in knowing I was swimming down to a place most of us leave when we get out of diapers and into training pants. I could see it on Ollie’s face, too. When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.