Under the Dome

by Stephen King

don’t know if we do or not, but when I was in Iraq, someone gave me a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. I carried it around in my pocket, read it cover to cover. Most of it makes more sense than our politicians do on their sanest days. One thing that stuck with me was this: Wish for sunshine, but build dykes. I think that’s what we—you, I mean—”

if you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.

When dawn was still long hours away, bad thoughts took on flesh and began to walk. In the middle of the night thoughts became zombies.

Because a man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.

“Broken.” “I don’t know. She won’t show it to me. She says, and I also quote, ‘I will only expose my smithyriddles to a professional eye.’” They burst out laughing, trying to stifle the sounds. From beyond the closed door, an old lady’s cracked and dolorous voice said: “It’s my ass that’s broke, not my ears. I hear that.”

I must accept those things over which I have no control. I must turn my adversities into advantages.

Remember Stubb, in Moby-Dick? “Whatever my fate, I’ll go to it laughing.”

As the doctors say, when you hear hoofbeats, you don’t think zebras.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a gasp.”

Sleepest thou? Jesus is said to have enquired of Peter. Couldst thou not watch one hour?

“For we saw as if through a glass darkly,” Piper Libby said. She was weeping. “But now we see as if face to face.”