Fairy Tale

by Stephen King

So much for Cujo the Terrible.

I turned to go and then he spoke again, but I don’t think it was to me. “A brave man helps. A coward just gives presents.”

I found out that the giant’s famous chant—Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman—was cribbed from King Lear, where a character named Edgar says, Child Roland to the dark tower came, His word was still Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man.

“Time is the water, Charlie. Life is just the bridge it flows under.”

I remember thinking that we all are, really, just ghosts on the face of the earth trying to believe we have weight and a place in the world.

Here is something I learned in Empis: good people shine brighter in dark times.

you know what they say about hope: it’s the thing with feathers. It can fly even for those who are imprisoned.

“Tempus fugit is a good one,” she said, “but time doesn’t always fly, as everyone who’s ever had to wait around for something knows. I think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.”

There’s a dark well in everyone, I think, and it never goes dry. But you drink from it at your peril. That water is poison.

Inspiration doesn’t knock.

“Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”

That much is true about songs (and many stories) even in my own world. They speak mind to mind, but only if you listen.

guns are like cheap cameras, all you have to do is point and shoot.

He was, in his own words, a coward who had brought presents instead of taking a stand. If you wanted to be cruel—I didn’t, but if you did—he’d been a bit like Christopher Polley. Which is to say, like Rumpelstiltskin.