UR

by Stephen King

“A good school,” he said, “is one nobody has ever heard of outside a thirty-mile radius. People call it a good school because nobody knows it’s a bad school, and most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.”

They were in some ways perfectly matched, at least for the short term; she was fiery iron, straight from the forge, and he—in his apartment filled with books—was the water in which she cooled herself.

It occurred to him that spite was a kind of methadone for lovers. Was it better to go cold turkey? Perhaps not.

Which led to an interesting insight into human nature, or at least the human nature of the academic: one liked to be perceived by one’s students as Old School, but by one’s peers as New School.

In a real dark night of the soul, Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Hadn’t it been Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer, who had called books “the scholar’s mistress?”

He could be the Sarah Palin of American letters. Because sometimes longshots came in. Both for good and for ill.

“You can get the person but you can’t get the evil,” Wesley said. “The evil always survives. Isn’t that a bitch. Just a total bitch.”

“You have no idea what you did,” the man in the yellow coat said in a meditative voice. “The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter.”