'Salem's Lot

by Stephen King

Storytelling is as natural as breathing; plotting is the literary version of artificial respiration.

it’s good to tell a story, and even better when people actually want to listen.

It proves little, except that perhaps in America even a pig can aspire to immortality.

“Mark Twain said a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.”

That was the value in not crying. Crying was like pissing everything out on the ground.

Heaven was a dim attraction compared to that of fighting—and perhaps perishing—in the service of the Lord.

Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym…

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth.

The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.

There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child’s rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys.

Part of the reason we don’t understand is because we don’t really know what the brain is. The best-educated doctor in the world is standing on a low island in the middle of a sea of ignorance.

she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.

The final thought in this hospital-bed train of reasoning was the hideous possibility that one’s body might not be a friend at all, but an enemy implacably dedicated to destroying the superior force that had used it and abused it ever since the disease of reason set in.