Robert > Robert's Quotes

“Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
― H. P. Lovercraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“God grant me to SERENITY to accept what I cannot change the TENACITY to change what I may and the GOOD LUCK not to fuck up too often”
― King, Stephen, ’Salem’s Lot

“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“The town has a sense, not of history, but of time, and the telephone poles seem to know this. If you lay your hand against one, you can feel the vibration from the wires deep within the wood, as if souls had been imprisoned in there and were struggling to get out.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“The sandwich he made was bologna and cheese, his favorite. All the sandwiches he made were his favorites; that was one of the advantages of being single.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“The town kept its secrets, and the Marsten House brooded over it like a ruined king.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“The essential and defining characteristic of childhood is not the effortless merging of dream and reality, but only alienation. There are no words for childhood's dark turns and exhalations. A wise child recognizes it and submits to the necessary consequences. A child who counts the cost is a child no longer.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“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.”
― Stephen King

“To his way of thinking, the only thing more natural than death was sex.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“Thin clouds form, and the shadows lengthen out. They have no breadth, as summer shadows have; there are no leaves on the trees or fat clouds in the sky to make them thick. They are gaunt, mean shadows that bite the ground like teeth.
As the sun nears the horizon, its benevolent yellow begins to deepen, to become infected, until it glares an angry inflamed orange. It throws a variegated glow over the horizon.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader's spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“If a man dethrones God in his heart, Satan must ascend to His position.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“That above all else. They did not look out their windows. No matter what noises or dreadful possibilities, no matter how awful the unknown, there was an even worse thing: to look the Gorgon in the face.”
― Stephen King, ’Salem’s Lot

“And all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“small towns have long memories and pass their horrors down ceremonially from generation to generation.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“At three in the morning the blood runs slow and thick, and slumber is heavy. The soul either sleeps in blessed ignorance of such an hour or gazes about itself in utter despair. There is no middle ground.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I'm blue -- when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day -- I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they are precious.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“I can't understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there's already so much pain in the world.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down - a thing not always easy to do. "Son, do you know what history is?"

"Uh...stuff that happened in the past?"

"Nope," he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. "History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why your folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“As W.H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. But that isn't where Auden starts his list. He starts with the innocent young.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“All little creatures are beautiful...every living thing when it first sees life is born in beauty. What they grow to be is a different matter.”
― Brian Jacques, Outcast of Redwall

“Shake paws, count your claws,
You steal mine, I'll borrow yours.
Watch my whiskers, check both ears.
Robber foxes have no fears.”
― Brian Jacques

“Defend the weak, protect both young and old, never desert your friends. Give justice to all, be fearless in battle and always ready to defend the right."

—The law of Badger Lords”
― Brian Jacques, Lord Brocktree

“At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago.”
― Stephen King, Cell

“Man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way.”
― Stephen King, Cell